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The  London  Venture 

MICHAEL  ARLEN 


<By  MICHAEL  ARLEN 

These  Charming  People 

The  Qreen  Hat 

"Piracy" 

The  London  Venture 

The  Romantic  Lady 


The 
London  Venture 

by 

Michael  Arlen 


With  Drawings  by 
MICHEL  SEVIER 


NEW  YORK 
GEORGE  H.  DORAN  COMPANY 


Copyright,   J  920, 
By  George  H.  Doran  Comfany 


THE    LONDON    VENTURE 

B 

PRINTED    IN    THE    UNITED    STATES    OF    AMERICA 


Tl 

6<-    I 


To 

THE  SISTER 

of 

SHELMERDENE 


APOLOGIA  PRO  NOMINE  MEO 

Out  of  consideration  (in  part)  to  such 
readers  as  may  read  this  book  I  have  assumed 
a  name  by  which  they  may  refer  to  me  (if 
ever  he  or  she  may  wish  to  do  so  kindly)  in 
the  same  manner  at  least  twice  running — a 
feat  of  pronunciation  which  few  of  my 
English  acquaintances  have  performed  with 
my  natal  name.  But  there  is  also  another 
reason,  considerate  of  the  author.  I  have 
been  told  that  there  are  writers  whose  works 
would  have  been  famous  if  only  their  names 
could  have  been  familiarly  pronounced — 
Polish  and  Russian  writers  for  the  most  part, 
I  gather.  Since  I  had  already  taken  every 
other  precaution  but  this  to  deserve  their 
more  fortunate  fate,  in  changing  my  name 
I  have,  I  hope,  robbed  my  readers  of  their 
last  excuse  for  my  obscurity. 

Dikran  Kouyoumdjian. 
"Michael  Arlen." 


Vll 


The  London  Venture:   I 


THE 
LONDON  VENTURE 


MY  watch  has  needed  winding  only 
twice  since  I  left  London,  and  al- 
ready, as  I  sit  here  in  the  strange  library  of 
a  strange  house,  whose  only  purpose  in  hav- 
ing a  library  seems  to  be  to  keep  visitors  like 
myself  quiet  and  out  of  harm's  way,  I  find 
myself  looking  back  to  those  past  months  in 
which  I  was  for  ever  complaining  of  the 
necessity  that  kept  me  in  London.  How  I 
would  deliver  myself  to  a  congenial  friend 
about  what  men  are  pleased  to  call  "the 
artificial  necessity  of  living" — a  cocktail, 
that  courtesan  of  drinks,  lent  some  artificial- 
ity !  With  what  sincerity  I  would  agree  with 
another's  complaint  of  the  "monotonous 
routine    of   politeness,"    without    indulging 

which   men   cannot   live    decently;   how    I 

11 


12  The  London   Venture 

would  mutter  to  myself  of  streets  and 
theatres  full  of  men  and  women  and  ugli- 
ness !  Even  as  a  cab  hurried  me  through  the 
Tottenham  Court  Road  to  Euston  the  smile 
which  I  turned  to  the  never-ending  windows 
of  furniture  shops  was  at  the  thought  that 
I  should  not  see  them  again  for  many  days, 
and  I  could  not  imagine  myself  ever  being 
pleased  to  come  back  to  this  world  of  plain 
women  and  bowler  hats  and  bawdily  col- 
oured cinema  posters,  whose  duty  it  is  to 
attract  and  insult  with  the  crude  portrayal 
of  the  indecent  passions  of  tiresome  people. 
If  there  be  a  studio  in  purgatory  for  indis- 
creet aesthetics,  Rhadamanthus  could  do  no 
better  than  paper  its  walls  with  illustrations 
of  "The  Blindness  of  Love,"  or  "Is  Love 
Lust1?"  For  it  is  now  a  London  of  coloured 
drawings  of  men  about  to  murder  or  be 
murdered,  women  about  to  be  seduced  or 
divorced.  One  has  to  see  a  crowd  of  people 
surging  into  a  cinema,  by  whose  doors  is  a 
poster  showing  a  particularly  vapid  servant- 
girl,  a  harlot  of  the  "dark-eyed,  sinister" 
type,  and  a  drunken,  fair-haired  young  man 
who  has  not  yet  realised  that  discretion  is 


The  London   Venture  13 

the  better  part  of  an  indiscretion,  before  one 
can  understand  "the  lure  of  the  screen." 

And  even  the  entrance  of  Euston,  rebuilt 
and  newly  painted,  gave  my  eyes  only  the 
pleasure  of  foreseeing  that  the  new  yellow 
paint  wrould  soon  be  dingy,  and  that  the  eyes 
of  porters  would  soon  no  longer  be  offended 
with  upstart  colours  which  quarrelled  with 
the  greyness  of  their  experience.  And  in  the 
carriage  I  leant  back  and  closed  my  eyes,  and 
was  glad  that  I  was  leaving  London. 

But  the  train  had  scarce  left  the  station, 
and  was  whirling  through  the  northern 
suburbs  which  should  so  fervently  have  con- 
firmed my  gladness,  when  I  felt  suddenly  as 
though  some  little  thing  was  being  born  in- 
side me,  as  though  some  little  speck  of  dust 
had  come  in  through  the  open  window,  and 
fixed  itself  upon  my  pleasure  at  leaving 
London;  and  very  soon  I  realised  that  this 
was  the  first  grain  of  regret,  and  that  I  should 
not  spend  so  many  months  away  from  Lon- 
don as  my  late  depression  had  imagined. 
Then  up  will  start  the  strong-minded  man, 
and  pish  and  pshaw  me  for  not  knowing  my 
own  mind.     And  if  he  does,  how  right  he 


14  The  London   Venture 

will  be!  For  little  do  I  care  whether  this 
mood  be  as  the  last,  so  they  both  fill  up  the 
present  moment  with  fitting  thoughts,  and 
pain,  and  pleasure ! 

Now,  I  was  already  thinking  of  how  I 
would  return  to  London  next  year  in  the 
spring.  What  I  would  do  then,  the  things  I 
would  write,  the  men  I  would  talk  to,  and 
the  women  I  would  lunch  with,  so  filled  my 
mind,  and  pleasantly  whirled  my  thoughts 
from  this  to  that,  that  Rugby  was  long  passed 
before  even  I  had  come  to  think  of  the 
pleasures  that  London  in  early  summer  has 
in  store  for  all  who  care  to  take.  When  the 
days  were  growing  long,  it  would  be  pleasant 
to  take  a  table  by  the  windows  of  the  Savoy, 
and  dine  there  with  some  woman  with  whom 
it  would  be  no  effort  to  talk  or  be  silent. 

Such  a  woman  at  once  comes  to  my  mind, 
with  dark  hair  and  grey-blue  eyes,  the  cor- 
ners of  whose  mouth  I  am  continually  watch- 
ing because  it  is  only  there  I  find  the  mean- 
ing of  her  eyes,  for  she  is  a  sphinx,  and  I  do 
not  yet  know  if  what  she  hides  is  a  secret  or  a 
sense  of  humour.  You  will  say  that  that 
means  nothing,  and  that  she  is  quite  invisible 


The  London   Venture  15 

to  you ;  but  you  do  not  know  her,  and  I  do — 
at  least,  I  know  that  much  of  her.  And  with 
her  it  seems  to  me  that  I  could  dine  only  at 
that  table  by  the  windows  where  I  could  turn 
from  her  eyes  to  the  slow-moving  English 
river,  and  the  specks  of  men  and  trams,  which 
are  all  that  the  leaves  of  trees  will  let  me  see 
of  the  Embankment.  Perhaps  I  would  tell 
her  of  that  novel  which  I  once  began  to 
write,  but  could  never  finish  nor  have  any 
heart  to  try  again;  for  it  began  just  here  at 
this  table  where  we  are  now  sitting,  but  the 
man  was  alone,  and  if  he  ever  lived  outside 
my  halting  pages  and  had  the  finishing  of 
my  novel,  he  would  put  himself  here  again 
at  the  end,  with  you  sitting  in  front  of  him. 
For  that  is  the  whole  purpose  of  the  novel, 
which  I  never  realised  till  this  moment,  that 
once  a  young  man  was  sitting  here  alone  and 
wondering  why  that  should  be  and  what  he 
should  do,  and  in  the  end  he  was  sitting  here 
again  with  a  woman  for  whom  his  passion 
had  died,  but  whose  eyes  still  made  him  talk 
so  that  he  could  not  see  the  slow  darkening 
of  the  river,  or  hear  the  emptying  of  the 
restaurant,  until  at  last  she  laughed,  and  he 


16  The  London  Venture 

had  to  stop  because  of  the  waiters  who 
hovered  round  the  table  to  relay  it  for  the 
bored  people  who  would  come  in  from  the 
theatres  for  supper.  But  all  this  I  had  never 
realised  till  I  told  you  of  it,  and  perhaps  now 
I  shall  one  day  finish  it,  and  call  it  "Nadine," 
for  that  is  your  name  in  the  novel. 

Thinking  of  the  young  man  of  my  un- 
finished novel  who  had  sat  there  so  alone 
sent  my  thoughts  back  to  the  day  not  many 
years  past  when  I  first  came  to  live  in  Lon- 
don. I  am  bitter  about  those  first  months, 
and  will  not  easily  forgive  London  for  them ; 
and  if  any  young  person  shall  begin  to  tell 
me  how  splendid  were  his  first  lonely  days  in 
the  wilderness  of  people,  how  much  he  en- 
joyed the.  aimless  wandering  about  the 
streets,  how  he  liked  to  watch  the  faces  of 
the  people  as  they  passed,  laughing,  or  talk- 
ing, or  hungry,  while  he  could  do  or  be  none 
of  these  for  lack  of  company  and  convenience 
of  means,  then  I  will  turn  on  him  and  curse 
him  for  a  fool  or  a  knave,  and  rend  the 
affected  conceit  of  his  self-contained  pleasure 
with  my  own  experience  and  that  of  many 
others  whom  I  know  of.     But  then  for  a 


The  London   Venture  17 

young  Englishman — how  pleasant  it  is  to 
write  of  "young  Englishmen,"  as  though  one 
were  really  a  foreigner! — the  circumstances 
are  a  little  different,  and  he  need  never  taste 
that  first  absolute  loneliness,  which,  as  the 
weeks  go  by  and  the  words  are  not  spoken, 
seems  to  open  out  a  vista  of  solitude  for  all 
the  days  of  life;  nor  need  he  be  conscious 
that  it  is  on  himself — how,  while  it  ex- 
aggerates, loneliness  stifles  self! — he  must 
rely  for  every  acquaintance,  for  every  word 
spoken  in  his  life.  But  for  him  there  are 
aunts  who  live  in  Chester  Square,  and 
cousins  who  come  up  to  stay  a  month  or  so 
at  the  Hyde  Park  Hotel,  and  uncles  who  live 
somewhere  about  Bruton  Street,  and  have 
such  a  fund  of  risque  anecdotes  that  the 
length  of  Bond  Street  and  Piccadilly  will 
not  see  the  end  of  them;  and,  perhaps,  there 
are  age-long  friends  of  the  family  who  have 
houses  in  Kensington  and  Hampstead,  and 
"nice"  parquet  floors  on  which  you  can 
dance  to  a  gramophone;  while  for  an  Ar- 
menian, who  soon  realises  that  his  nationality 
is  considered  as  something  of  a  faux  pas, 
there  are  none  of  these  things,  and  he  is 


18  The  London   Venture 

entirely  lost  in  the  wilderness,  for  there  is 
no  solid  background  to  his  existence  in  an- 
other's country;  and,  as  the  days  lengthen 
out  and  he  grows  tired  of  walking  in  the 
Green  Park,  he  comes  to  wonder  why  his 
fathers  ever  left  Hayastan;  for  it  seems  to 
me  much  better  to  be  a  murdered  prince  in 
Hayastan  than  a  living  vagabond  in  London. 
So  I  wandered  about,  moved  my  chambers 
gradually  from  Earl's  Court  to  the  heart  of 
St.  James's  and  read  "Manon  Lescaut,"  and 
sat  in  front  of  Gainsborough's  "Musidora" 
until  I  found  that  she  had  three  legs,  and 
could  never  look  at  it  again. 

Then,  somehow,  came  acquaintance,  first 
of  the  world,  then  of  literature  and  its  para- 
sites; came  teas  at  Golder's  Green  and 
Hampstead,  and  queerly  serious  discussions 
about  sub-consciousness;  "rags"  at  Chelsea, 
and  "dalliance  with  grubbiness,"  and  women. 
Through  this  early  maze  of  ribaldry  and  dis- 
cussion, the  first  of  which  bored  me  because 
of  its  self-consciousness,  and  because  I  do 
not  like  lying  on  the  dirty  floors  of  studios 
with  candle  grease  dripping  on  me,  and  the 
latter  which  affected  my  years  miserably  and 


The  London   Venture  19 

almost  entirely  perverted  my  natural  ami- 
ability into  a  morbid  distate  for  living 
(which  still  breaks  out  at  odd  moments,  and 
has  branded  me  among  many  people  as  a 
depressing  and  damnably  superior  young 
person)  ;  through  this  maze  of  smoke  and  talk 
I  can  only  still  see  the  occasional  personality 
of  Mr.  D.  H.  Lawrence,  as  his  clear,  grey 
eyes — there  is  no  equivalent  to  spirituel  in 
English — flashed  from  face  to  face,  smiling 
sometimes,  often  but  a  vehicle  for  those  bit- 
ter thoughts  (and  thoughts  are  so  often  con- 
clusions with  men  of  arrogant  genius  like 
Lawrence)  which  find  such  strange  and 
emphatic  expression  in  his  books.  I  would 
need  the  pen  of  a  De  Quincey  to  describe  my 
impression  of  that  man,  and  I  am  candid 
enough  to  admit  that  I  lack  the  ability,  rather 
than  the  malice,  which  caused  the  little 
opium-eater  to  be  so  justly  hated  by  such  a 
man  as  Bob  Southey.  There  is  a  bitterness 
which  can  find  no  expression,  is  inarticulate, 
and  from  that  we  turn  away  as  from  a  very 
pitiful  thing;  and  there  is  that  bitterness 
which  is  as  clear-cut  as  a  diamond,  shining 
with  definitions,  hardened  with  the  use  of 


20  The  London   Venture 

a  subtle  reasoning  which  is  impenetrable  but 
penetrating,  "the  outcome  of  a  fecund 
imagination,"  as  Lawrence  himself  might  de- 
scribe it;  a  bitterness  so  concisely  and  philo- 
sophically articulate,  that,  under  the  guise  of 
"truth,"  it  will  penetrate  into  the  receptive 
mind,  and  leave  there  some  indelible  impres- 
sions of  a  strange  and  dominating  mind.  I 
have  found  that  in  the  books  and  person  of 
Mr.  D.  H.  Lawrence.  He  seems  to  lack 
humility  definitely,  as  a  man  would  lack 
bread  to  eat,  and  a  note  of  arrogance,  as 
splendid  as  it  is  shameless,  runs  through  his 
written  words;  and  the  very  words  seem  con- 
scious that  they  are  pearls  flung  before  swine. 
He  will  pile  them  one  on  top  of  the  other, 
as  though  to  impregnate  each  with  his  own 
egotism,  to  describe  the  sexual  passions  of 
this  man  or  that  woman,  words  so  full  of  his 
meaning,  so  pregnant  with  his  passions,  that 
at  the  end  of  such  a  page  you  feel  that  a 
much  greater  and  more  human  Ruskin  is 
hurling  his  dogmas  at  your  teeth,  that  there 
is  nothing  you  can  say  or  think  outside  that 
pile  of  feeling  which  is  massed  before  you, 
that  you  must  accept  and  swallow  without 


The  London  Venture  21 

cavil  and  without  chewing.  With  what  re- 
lief one  turns  over  a  page  and  finds  that  here 
is  no  touch  of  the  flesh,  but  that  Mr.  Law- 
rence is  writing  of  earth !  Let  him  sink  into 
earth  as  deep  as  he  may,  he  can  find  and 
show  there  more  beauty  and  more  truth  than 
in  all  his  arrogant  and  passionate  fumblings 
in  the  mire  of  sex,  in  all  his  bitter  striving 
after  that,  so  to  speak,  sexual  millennium, 
that  ultimate  psychology  of  the  body  and 
mind,  which  seems  so  to  obsess  him  that  in 
his  writings  he  has  buried  his  mind,  as,  in 
his  own  unpleasant  phrase,  a  lover  buried 
his  head,  in  the  "terrible  softness  of  a 
woman's  belly."  Who  has  not  read  "Sons 
and  Lovers,"  and  laid  it  down  as  the  work  of 
a  strange  and  great  man,  of  the  company  of 
Coleridge,  Stendhal,  and  Balzac4?  And  who, 
as  he  read  it,  has  not  been  shocked  by  a 
total  lack  of  that  sweetness  which  must  alloy 
all  strength  to  make  it  acceptable?  "That 
strange  interfusion  of  strength  and  sweet- 
ness," which  Pater  so  admiringly  found  in 
Blake  and  Hugo,  cannot  be  found  in  Mr. 
D.  H.  Lawrence;  there  is  a  mass  of  pas- 
sionate strength,  that  of  an  angry  man  strain- 


22  The  London   Venture 

ing  with  his  nerves  because  he  despises  his 
hands ;  there  is  a  gentleness  in  his  writing  of 
children  which  could  never  be  capable  of 
such  melodrama  as  that  in  Mr.  Hardy's 
"Jude  the  Obscure,"  but  in  his  men  and 
women,  in  their  day  and  night,  there  is  no 
drop  of  sweetness.  And  I  do  not  think  he 
wishes  it  otherwise. 

As  the  train  flew  through  the  Derbyshire 
countryside,  whose  hillsides  and  vales,  cov- 
ered with  the  brilliant  sheen  of  the  autumn 
sun,  met  the  eye  pleasantly  with  a  rising  and 
falling  of  pale  yellowish  green,  with  here 
and  there  a  dark  green  patch  of  woodland, 
and  made  me  want  to  stop  the  hurrying 
train  and  breathe  the  air  of  the  place,  my 
thoughts  slipped  back  to  the  spring  and  the 
summer  just  before  the  war;  and,  with  my 
eyes  on  the  quickly  passing  sunshine  on  the 
low  hills,  I  found  that,  after  all,  those  last 
few  months  of  peace  had  passed,  perhaps, 
too  lightly,  too  carelessly;  but  it  was  pleasant 
to  think  back  to  those  days  when  lunches  and 
dinners  and  week-ends  took  up  so  much  of 
one's  time.  I  was  glad  now  that  I  had  not 
spent  the  three  summer  months  in  Yorkshire 


The  London   Venture  23 

on  the  moors,  where  I  should  have  been  un- 
comfortable; and  had  to  be  for  ever  sending 
postcards  to  Hatchard's  to  post  me  this  or 
that  book,  which  would  come  when  my  mood 
for  it  had  passed. 

And  how  dreadful  it  is  to  want  to  read 
suddenly  "Love  in  the  Valley,"  and  have  to 
be  content  with  Tennyson,  to  long  for  a 
chapter  of  DostoiefTsky,  and  be  met  with, 
complete  editions  of  Trollope  and  Surtees! 
So  I  see  that  my  middle  age  will  be  crabbed 
and  made  solitary  by  my  books,  and  that  I 
shall  never  have  the  heart  to  leave  them  and 
go  to  the  East  to  see  the  land  of  my  father 
Haik,  or  to  walk  about  the  lake  upon  which 
the  great  Queen  Semiramis  (who  was  the 
first  in  the  world  to  discover  that  men  could 
be  conveniently  changed  into  eunuchs)  built 
the  city  Semiramakert,  which  is  now  called 
Van,  and  where  later,  when  she  was  pursued 
by  the  swordsmen  of  her  son,  she  threw  a 
magic  bracelet  into  the  lake  and  turned  her- 
self into  a  rock,  which  still  stands  there  cov- 
ered with  the  triumphant  script  of  the 
Assyrians. 


The  London   Venture:   II 


II 

ONCE  (in  those  far-off  peaceful  days 
when  men  still  had  enough  grammati- 
cal sense  to  know  that  the  word  "pacifist" 
does  not  exist,  but  that  the  less  convenient 
"pacificist"  does)  I  had  been  very  depressed 
for  a  week,  and  had  scarcely  spoken  to  any 
one,  but  had  just  walked  about  in  my  rooms 
and  on  the  Embankment,  for  I  suddenly 
found  myself  without  any  money  at  all;  and 
it  is  thus  with  me  that  when  I  am  without 
money  I  am  also  without  ideas,  but  when  I 
have  the  first  I  do  not  necessarily  have  the 
last.  I  wondered  if  I  had  not  done  a  very 
silly  thing  in  being  independent,  and  in  not 
doing  as  my  brothers  had  done,  reading  "The 
Times"  in  an  office  every  morning  from  ten 
to  twelve,  and  playing  dominoes  in  the  after- 
noon, and  auction  bridge  in  the  evening,  and 
having  several  thousands  a  year  when  I  was 
forty,  and  a  Wolseley  car  to  take  my  wife 

for  a  holiday  to  Windermere,  because  she 

27 


28  The  London   Venture 

looked  pale,  or  because  we  were  bored  with 
each  other.  I  smiled  to  think  of  the  look  on 
my  brothers'  faces  if  I  suddenly  appeared 
at  their  office  one  morning,  and  said  that  it 
was  no  good,  and  that  I  couldn't  write,  and 
was  very  hungry.  I  could  not  make  up  my 
mind  whether  they  would  laugh  at  me  and 
turn  me  out,  or  whether  they  would  teach  me 
how  to  play  auction  and  set  me  to  answer  let- 
ters about  what  had  happened  on  such  and 

such  a  day  inst.,  and  why  the  firm  of 

thought  it  unnecessary  that  it  should  happen 
again,  while  they  would  sit  in  the  next  room, 
marked  "Private,"  signing  cheques  and  talk- 
ing to  visitors  about  the  weather  and  the 
cotton  markets.  Perhaps  I  will  do  that  some 
day,  for,  from  what  I  have  heard,  it  seems 
to  me  the  easiest  thing  in  the  world  to  talk 
about  rises  and  falls  and  margins  without 
knowing  anything  about  them  at  all. 

The  same  thing  happens  with  regard  to 
books,  for  one  often  meets  people  who  seem 
to  have  read  every  modern  novel,  and  can 
discuss  quite  prettily  whether  Mr.  Wells  is 
a  man  or  a  machine,  or  whether  Mr.  Arnold 
Bennett,  ever  since  he  wrote  the  last  lines  to 


The  London  Venture  29 

"The  Old  Wives'  Tales,"  has  not  decided 
that  it  is  better  to  be  a  merchant  than  a 
writer,  or  whether  Mr.  E.  V.  Lucas  thinks 
he  is  the  second  Charles  Lamb,  and  what 
other  grounds  than  his  splendid  edition  has 
he  for  thinking  so,  or  whether  Mr.  George 
Moore  does  or  does  not  think  that  indiscre- 
tion is  the  better  part  of  literature,  or  whether 
Mr.  Chesterton  or  vegetarianism  has  had  the 
greatest  effect  on  Mr.  Shaw's  religion;  but 
then,  after  all  this  talk,  it  turns  out  that 
they  read  "The  Times  Literary  Supplement" 
every  week,  and  think  Epictetus  nothing  to 
Mr.  Clutton-Brock,  or  they  are  steeped  in 
Mr.  Clement  Shorter's  weekly  criticism  en 
deshabille  in  the  "Illustrated  London  News." 
At  last  I  could  stand  my  depression  no 
longer,  and  late  one  night,  after  a  day  in 
which  I  had  spoken  to  no  one  but  a  little 
old  woman  who  said  that  she  wasn't  a  beg- 
gar but  that  God  blessed  the  charitable,  I 
sat  down  and  wrote  a  long,  conceited  letter 
to  Shelmerdene;  for  to  her  I  can  write 
whether  I  am  gay  or  depressed,  and  be  sure 
that  she  will  not  be  impatient  with  me.  I 
told  her  how  I  had  a  great  fund  of  ambition, 


30  The  London  Venture 

but  had  it  not  in  me  to  satisfy  a  tenth  part 
of  it;  for  that  is  in  the  character  of  all  my 
people,  they  promise  much  greater  things  in 
their  youth  than  they  can  fulfil  in  their 
mature  age.  From  twenty  onwards  they  are 
continually  growing  stale,  and  bitter  with 
their  staleness;  the  little  enthusiasm  of  their 
youth  will  not  stretch  through  their  whole 
life,  but  will  flicker  out  shamefully  with  the 
conceit  of  their  own  precocity,  and  in  trying 
to  fly  when  other  people  are  just  learning  to 
walk ;  and  as  the  years  pass  on  and  youth  be- 
comes regret,  the  son  of  Haik,  the  faded  off- 
spring of  a  faded  nation  whose  only  call  to 
exist  is  because  it  has  lived  so  long  and  has 
memories  of  the  sacking  of  Nineveh  and 
Carchemish,  is  left  without  the  impetus  of 
development/  with  an  ambition  which  is 
articulate  only  in  bitterness;  while  the  hardy 
Northerner,  descendant  of  barbarian  Druid 
worshippers  whose  nakedness  was  rumoured 
with  horror  in  the  courts  and  pleasure  gar- 
dens of  Hayastan  and  Persia,  slowly  grows 
in  mind  as  in  body,  and  soon  outstrips  the 
petty  outbursts  of  the  other's  stationary 
genius.    I  told  Shelmerdene  that  I,  who  had 


The  London   Venture  31 

thought  that  England  had  given  me  at  least 
some  of  her  continually  growing  enthusiasm, 
that  I  who  had  thought  I  would  not,  like  so 
many  of  my  countrymen,  be  too  soon  stranded 
on  "the  ultimate  islands"  of  Oriental  decay, 
was  even  now  in  the  stage  between  the  dying 
of  enthusiasm  and  its  realisation;  for  the 
first  impetus  of  my  youthful  conceits  was 
vanishing,  and  there  looked  to  be  nothing 
left  to  them  but  an  "experience"  and  a  "les- 
son of  life"  without  which  I  would  have 
been  much  happier.  In  moods  such  as  these 
one  can  hear  in  the  far  distance  the  wailing 
of  a  dirge,  a  knell,  indefinitely  yet  distinctly, 
and  the  foreboding  it  brings  is  of  an  end  toi 
something  which  should  have  no  end;  a  fall- 
ing away,  a  premature  decay  which  is  like  a 
growing  cloud  soon  to  cover  the  whole  mind. 
.  .  .  Shelmerdene,  do  you  know  the  story  of 
the  Dan-nan-Ron,  which  Fiona  Macleod 
tells?  How  there  lived  three  brothers  on 
the  isle  of  Eilanmore :  Marcus,  who  was  "the 
Eilanmore,"  and  Gloom,  whose  voice  "was 
low  and  clear,  but  cold  as  pale  green  water 
running  under  ice,"  and  Sheumais,  on  whose 
brow  lay  "the  dusk  of  the  shadow."    Gloom 


32  The  London   Venture 

was  the  wisest  of  the  brothers,  and  played 
upon  an  oaten  flute,  which  is  called  a  feadan; 
and  men  were  afraid  of  the  cold,  white  notes 
of  his  barbaric  runes,  as  he  played  his  feadan 
from  rock  to  rock  and  on  the  seashore,  but 
most  of  all  they  feared,  the  playing  of  the 
Dan-nan-Ron,  which  is  the  Song  of  the  Seal 
and  calls  men  to  their  death  in  the  sea.  And 
when  the  eldest  brother  Marcus  was  killed 
with  the  throwing  of  a  knife,  the  murderer 
heard  the  woods  of  Gloom,  which  said  that 
he  would  hear  the  Dan-nan-Ron  the  night 
before  he  died,  and  lest  he  should  doubt 
those  words,  he  would  hear  it  again  in  the 
very  hour  of  his  death.  It  happened  as 
Gloom  said :  for  one  night  the  playing  of  the 
feadan  drove  the  slayer,  Manus  MacCodrum, 
down  into  the  sea,  and  as  he  battled  madly 
in  the  water,  and  the  blood  gushed  out  of 
his  body  as  the  teeth  of  seals  tore  the  life 
out  of  him,  he  heard  from  far  away  the  cold, 
white  notes  of  the  Dan-nan-Ron. 

This  tale  always  brings  to  me  that  many 
men,  in  some  sudden  moment  which  even 
M.  Maeterlinck  would  hesitate  to  define  as 
"a  treasure  of  the  humble,"  hear  the  playing 


The  London   Venture  33 

of  a  tune  such  as  that,  which  tells  them  of 
some  ending,  unknown  and  indefinite,  just 
as,  in  the  moments  of  greatest  love,  a  man 
will  feel  for  a  terrible  second  the  shivering 
white  ice  of  sanity,  which  tells  him  a  dif- 
ferent tale  to  that  which  he  is  murmuring  to 
the  woman  in  his  arms.  Men  who  have 
heard  it  must  have  become  morose  with  the 
fear  this  distant  dirge  brought  upon  them; 
but  of  that  foreboding  nothing  certain  can  be 
known,  and  it  is  only  in  such  a  mood  as  this, 
and  to  /a  Shelmerdene  of  women,  that  a  fool 
will  loosen  his  foolishness  to  inquire  into 
such  things.  Clarence  Mangan  must  have 
heard  the  tune  as  he  lay  drunk  and  wretched 
in  his  Dublin  garret,  for  there  is  more  than 
Celtic  gloom  in  the  dirge  of  his  lines.  John 
Davidson,  whose  poetry  you  so  love,  and 
who  wrote  in  a  moment  of  madness  "that 
Death  has  loaded  dice,"  must  have  heard  it, 
perhaps  when  first  he  came  to  venture  his 
genius  in  London,  a  young  man  with  a 
strange,  bad-tempered  look  in  his  eyes;  and 
he  must  have  heard  the  exulting  notes,  as 
clearly  as  did  Manus  MacCodrum,  when  he 
walked  into  the  sea  from  Cornwall.    Charles 


* 


34  The  London  Venture 

Meryon  must  have  heard  it  as  he  walked 
hungrily  about  the  streets  of  Paris,  and 
wondered  why  those  gargoyles — strange 
things  to  beautify! — on  Notre  Dame,  into 
which  he  had  put  so  much  life,  could  not 
scream  aloud  to  the  people  of  Paris  that  a 
genius  was  dying  among  them  for  lack  of 
food  and  praise.  Do  you  remember,  Shel- 
merdene,  how  you  and  I,  when  first  I  began 
to  know  you,  stood  before  a  little  imp  of 
wonderfully  carved  onyx  stone  which  leered 
at  us  from  the  centre  of  your  mantelpiece, 
and  I  said  that  it  was  like  one  of  those  gar- 
goyles of  Meryon's;  and  that  afternoon  I 
told  you  about  his  life  and  death,  and  when 
I  had  finished  you  said  that  I  told  the  tale 
as  though  I  enjoyed  it,  instead  of  being 
frightened  by  the  tragedy  of  it.  But  I  ad- 
mired your  imp  of  onyx  stone  very  much, 
telling  you  that  I  loved  its  ravenous  mouth 
and  reptile  claws,  because  they  looked  so 
helplessly  lustful  after  something  unattain- 
able; and  that  same  night  I  found  a  little 
black-and-gold  box  awaiting  me  in  my  rooms, 
in  which  was  the  imp  of  onyx  stone,  and  a 
note  saying  that  I  must  put  it  on  my  table 


# 


The  London   Venture  35 

because  it  would  bring  me  luck.  For  a  sec- 
ond I  did  not  believe  your  words,  but  thought 
that  you  had  given  it  to  me  to  be  a  symbol 
for  my  helplessness,  for  I  had  said  that  it 
lusted  after  something  utterly  unattainable. 
But  the  second  passed,  and  I  found  later  that 
you  had  forgotten  those  words,  and  had  sent 
it  to  me  because  I  liked  it.  ...  I  would  like 
to  spend  these  glorious  spring  days  away 
from  London  with  you,  in  quietness,  perhaps 
in  Galway  somewhere;  but  if  you  cannot 
come  away  with  me  to-morrow,  I  will  take 
you  out  to  dinner  instead,  and  we  will  talk 
about  yourself  and  the  ci-devant s  who  have 
loved  you;  and  though  I  have  no  money  at 
all  now,  I  am  quite  sure  that  to-morrow  will 
bring  some. 

Sure  enough  a  few  hours  later  I  awoke  to 
a  bright  spring  morning,  which  brought 
happiness  in  itself,  even  without  the  help  of 
a  cheque  which  a  recreant  editor  had  at  last 
thought  fit  to  send  me.  As  I  walked  out 
into  the  blaze  of  sunshine  on  the  King's 
Road,  I  felt  that  I  must  surely  be  a  miserable 
fellow  to  let  my  ill-nature  so  often  oppress 
me  that  only  very  seldom  I  was  allowed  to 


36  The  London   Venture 

enjoy  such  mornings  as  this;  mornings 
which  seem  to  spring  suddenly  out  at  you 
from  a  night  of  ordinary  sleep,  when,  as  you 
walk  through  streets  which  perhaps  only 
the  day  hefore  you  hated  bitterly,  the  spring 
sun  wholly  envelops  your  mind  and  comes 
between  yourself  and  your  pretty  dislikes, 
and  the  faces  of  men  and  women  look  brown, 
and  red,  and  happy  as  the  light  and  shadow 
play  on  them;  such  a  day  was  this,  a  pearl 
dropped  at  my  feet  from  the  tiara  of  some 
Olympian  goddess. 

Later  I  telephoned  to  Shelmerdene  to  ask 
her  to  lunch  with  me  instead  of  dine,  as  the 
day  was  so  beautiful;  but  she  said  that  she 
had  already  promised  to  lunch  with  some 
one,  a  man  who  had  loved  her  faithfully  for 
more  than  ten  years,  and  as  all  he  wanted 
from  her  was  her  company  over  lunch  on 
this  particular  day  of  the  week,  she  could 
not  play  him  false,  even  though  the  day  was 
so  beautiful.  But  I  told  her  that  I  would 
not  be  loving  her  faithfully  for  ten  years, 
and  that  she  must  take  the  best  of  me  while 
she  could,  and  that  on  such  a  day  as  this  it 
would  be  a  shame  to  lunch  with  an  inarticu- 


The  London   Venture  37 

late  lover;  for  a  man  who  had  loved  her 
faithfully  for  more  than  ten  years,  and 
wanted  only  her  company  over  lunch  once  a 
week,  must  be  inarticulate,  or  perhaps  a 
knave  whose  subtle  cunning  her  innocence 
had  failed  to  unveil.  So  in  the  end  we 
lunched  together  in  Knightsbridge,  and  then 
walked  slowly  through  the  Park. 

The  first  covering  of  spring  lay  on  every 
thing.  The  trees,  so  ashamed — or  was  it 
coyness? — were  they  of  their  bareness  in 
face  of  all  the  greenness  around  them,  were 
doing  their  best  to  hurry  out  that  clothing 
of  leaves  which,  in  a  few  weeks'  time,  would 
baffle  the  rays  of  the  sun  which  had  helped 
their  birth;  and  there  was  such  a  greenness 
and  clearness  in  the  air  and  on  the  grass,  and 
about  the  flowers  which  seemed  surprised  at 
the  new  warmth  of  the  world,  hesitating  as 
yet  to  show  their  full  beauty  for  they  were 
afraid  that  the  dark  winter  was  playing  them 
a  trick  and  would  suddenly  lurch  clumsily 
upon  them  again,  that  the  Park  has  never 
seemed  to  me  so  beautiful  as  on  that  spring 
afternoon  when  a  careless  happiness  lay 
about  everything. 


38  The  London   Venture 

So  far  I  have  not  said  a  word  about  Shel- 
merdene,  except  that  she  had  found  a  man — 
or,  rather,  he  had  tiresomely  found  her — to 
love  her  faithfully  for  ten  years,  and  she  had 
so  affected  him  that  he  thought  a  weekly 
lunch  or  dinner  was  the  limit  of  his  destiny 
with  her.  And  yet,  had  he  searched  himself 
and  raked  out  the  least  bit  of  gumption,  he 
would  have  found  he  was  tremendously 
wrong  about  her — for  there  were  pinnacles 
to  be  reached  with  Shelmerdene  unattainable 
within  the  material  limits  of  a  mere  lunch  or 
dinner.  She  was  just  such  a  delightful 
adventuress  as  only  a  well-bred  mixture  of 
American  and  English  can  sometimes  make; 
such  a  subtle  negation  of  the  morals  of  Bos- 
ton or  Kensington  that  she  would,  in  the 
searching  light  of  the  one  or  the  other,  have 
been  acclaimed  the  shining  light  of  their 
William  Morris  drawing-rooms.  She  drew 
men  with  a  tentative,  all-powerful  little 
finger,  and  mocked  them  a  little,  but  never 
so  cruelly  that  they  weren't,  from  the  in- 
articulate beginning  to  the  inevitable  end,/ 
deliriously  happy  to  be  miserable  about  her. 
She    was    a    Princess    Casassimma    without 


The  London   Venture  39 

anarchical  affectations;  and  like  her  she  was 
almost  too  good  to  be  true. 

So  much  then,  for  Shelmerdene;  for  if  to 
cap  it  all,  I  should  go  on  to  say  that  she  was 
beautiful  I  would  be  held  to  have  been  an 
infatuated  fool.  Which,  perhaps,  I  care- 
lessly was,  since  I  can't  even  now  exactly  fix 
upon  the  colour  of  her  hair,  doubting  now 
in  memory  as  I  must  have  done  actually  in 
those  past  days  with  her,  whether  it  was 
brown  or  black  or,  as  sometimes  on  a  sofa 
under  a  Liberty-shaded  lamp,  a  silver-tinted 
blue,  so  wonderfully  deep.  .  .  .  Perhaps 
destined,  in  that  future  when  Shelmerdene 
is  at  last  tired  of  playing  at  life,  to  be  the 
"blue  silver"  of  the  besotted  madman  to 
whom  she,  at  the  weary  end,  with  but  a  look 
back  at  the  long-passed  procession  of  ci- 
devants,  will  thankfully  give  herself.  Dies 
irtz.  dies  ilia.  .  .  . 


The  London   Venture:    III 


Ill 

WE  sat  on  chairs  in  the  sun,  and  after 
we  had  been  silent  a  long  while,  she 
began  to  do  what  women  will  never  cease 
doing,  so  wise  men  say,  as  long  as  men  say 
they  love  them,  to  define  what  the  love  of  a 
man  meant  to  a  woman,  and  to  explain  the 
love  of  a  man.  She  said  that  that  man  was 
wise  who  had  said  that  love  was  like  religion, 
and  must  be  done  well  or  not  at  all,  but  that 
she  had  never  yet  found  in  any  man  sincere 
love  and  delicacy,  for  there  was  always  some- 
thing coarse,  some  little  note  which  jarred, 
some  movement  of  the  mind  and  body  mal- 
adroit, in  a  man  who  is  shown  a  woman's 
love.  "When  men  love  and  are  not  loved," 
she  said,  "often  they  kept  their  grace  and 
pride,  and  women  are  proud  to  be  loved  by 
such  men — even  faithfully  for  more  than  ten 
years;  but  when  men  are  loved  and  are  con- 
fident, then  they  seem  to  lose  delicacy,  to 
think  that  love  breaks  down  all  barriers  be- 
tween man  and  woman;  that  love  is  a  vase 

43 


44  The  London   Venture 

of  iron,  unbreakable,  and  not,  as  it  is,  a  vase 
of  the  most  delicate  and  brittle  pottery,  to 
be  broken  to  pieces  by  the  least  touch  of  a 
careless  hand.  They  seem  to  think  that  the 
state  of  love  stands  at  the  end  of  a  great 
striving;  they  do  not  realise  that  it  is  only 
the  beginning,  and  that  the  striving  must 
never  cease,  for  without  striving  there  is  no 
love,  but  only  content.  But  they  do  not  see 
that;  they  insist  on  spoiling  love,  breaking 
the  vase  with  stupid,  unconscious  hands;  and 
when  it  breaks  they  are  surprised,  and  they 
say  that  love  is  a  fickle  thing  and  will  stand 
no  tests,  and  that  women  are  the  very  devil. 
Always  they  spoil  love;  it  comes  and  finds 
them  helpless,  puzzling  whether  to  clothe 
themselves  entirely  in  reserve  or  whether  to 
be  entirely  naked  in  brutality;  and  generally 
they  compromise,  and,  physically  and  men- 
tally, walk  about  in  their  shirts." 

"As  you  say  that,"  I  said,  "you  remind 
me  of  that  woman,  Mrs.  Millamant,  in 
Congreve's  play,  'The  Way  of  the  World.' 
Do  you  remember  that  scene  between  her 
and  Mirabell,  when  she  attaches  'provisos' 
to  her  consent  to  marry  him  ?    She  says,  'We 


The  London   Venture  45 

must  be  as  strange  as  though  we  had  been 
married  a  long  time,  and  as  well  bred  as 
though  we  had  never  been  married  at  all.' 
And  it  seems  to  me  that  she  was  right,  and 
that  you  are  right,  Shelmerdene.  Nowadays 
there  is  a  reaction  against  convention,  and 
such  people  make  life  unclean.  They  talk 
about  being  'natural,'  and  succeed  only  in 
being  boorish;  they  think  that  the  opposite 
of  'natural'  is  'artificial,'  but  that  is  absurd, 
for  why  was  the  title  'gentleman'  invented 
if  not  for  the  man  who  could  put  a  present- 
able gloss  on  his  primitive,  'natural'  instincts 
in  polite  company?  There  must  always  be 
etiquette  in  life  and  in  love,  and  there  is  no 
friendship  or  passion  which  can  justify 
familiarity  trying  to  break  down  the  barriers 
which  hide  every  man  and  every  woman  from 
the  outside  world.  Men  grow  mentally 
limp  with  their  careless  way  of  living;  and 
life  is  like  walking  on  the  Embankment  at 
three  o'clock  in  the  morning,  when  London 
is  very  silent:  and  if  you  lounge  along  as 
your  feet  take  you,  your  hands  deep  in  your 
pockets,  being  'natural,'  you  will  see  very 
little  but  the  general  darkness  of  the  night 


46  The  London   Venture 

and  the  patch  of  pavement  on  which  your 
eyes  are  glued :  but  if  you  walk  upright,  your 
mind  taut  and  rigid  as  it  always  must  be  ex- 
cept when  asleep,  then  you  will  see  many 
things,  how  the  river  looks  strange  beneath 
the  stars,  the  mystery  of  Battersea  Park 
which  might,  in  the  darkness,  be  an  endless 
forest  of  distantly  murmuring  trees,  the 
figure  of  a  policeman  by  the  bridge,  a  light 
here  and  there  in  the  windows  of  the  houses 
in  Cheyne  Walk,  which  might  mean  birth  or 
death  or  nothing,  but  is  food  for  your  mind 
because  you  are  living  and  interested  in  all 
living  things.  It  was  probably  some  wise 
philosopher,  an  Epicurean,  and  not  a  buf- 
foon, as  is  supposed,  who  first  uttered  that 
saying  which -is  now  become  farcical,  that 
'distance  lends  enchantment.'  For  he  did 
not  mean  the  material  distance  of  yards  and 
furlongs  and  miles,  but  the  distance  of  neces- 
sary strangeness,  of  inevitable  mystery,  and 
of  a  rigid  mental  etiquette,  the  good  man- 
ners of  the  mind.  And  that  is  why  Henry 
James  was  a  great  man,  and  with  a  great 
propaganda.  He  was  subtle  with  his  propa- 
ganda— an  ugly  word  which  can  be  used  for 


The  London   Venture  47 

other  things  than  the  bawling  of  tiresome 
men  in  this  Park  on  Sunday  afternoons — 
for  he  could  do  nothing  without  an  almost 
obvious  subtlety;  but  it  is  there  in  all  his 
work,  a  teaching  for  all  who  care  to  be 
taught.  In  the  world  of  Henry  James,  for 
he  was  more  fastidious  than  Meredith  or 
Mr.  Hardy  and  would  have  nothing  to  do 
with  this  world  as  it  was,  but  made  one  of 
his  own,  in  this  world  the  men  and  women 
are  not  just  men  and  women,  with  thoughts 
and  doings  bluntly  and  coarsely  expressed 
as  in  real  life;  but  he  showed  them  to  be 
subtle  creatures,  something  higher  than 
clever  animals,  with  different  shades  of 
meaning  in  every  word — what  fool  was  it 
who  said  that  a  word  spoken  must  be  a  word 
meant ! — with  barriers  of  reserve  and  strange- 
ness between  each  person;  and  their  conver- 
sation is  not  just  a  string  of  words,  but  a 
thing  of  different  values,  in  which  the  mind 
of  the  speaker  and  the  listener  is  alive  and 
rigid  to  every  current  of  refined  thought 
which  is  often  unexpressed  but  understood. 
I  think  'thin'  is  the  right  epithet  for  the 
minds  of  James'  characters;  and  the  differ- 


48  The  London   Venture 

ence  between  them  and  ordinary  people  is 
that  within  us  there  is  a  sort  of  sieve  between 
the  mind  and  the  mouth,  or  in  whatever  way 
we  choose  to  be  articulate,  which,  unlike 
ordinary  sieves,  allows  only  the  coarse  grains 
to  drop  through  and  be  given  out,  but  keeps 
the  subtleties  and  the  refinement  to  itself; 
but  between  the  minds  and  the  articulation 
of  James'  people  there  are  no  sieves,  and 
the  inner  subtleties  and  shades  are  given 
expression.  There  is  a  strangeness,  a  kind 
of  mental  tautness,  a  never-ceasing  etiquette, 
about  them  all." 

But  then  I  laughed,  and  when  she  asked 
me  why  I  did  not  go  on,  I  said  that  I  had 
suddenly  realised  that  I  had  strayed  from 
the  subject,  and  that  whereas  she  had  begun 
to  talk  of  love  I  had  ended  by  talking  of 
Henry  James.  "It  is  all  about  the  same 
thing,"  she  said,  "for  we  are  both  grumbling 
at  that  mental  limpness  which  makes  people 
think  that  they  need  make  no  effort,  but  that 
life  will  go  on  around  them  just  the  same. 
And  that  is  why  I  think  one  of  the  most 
dreadful  sights  is  a  man  asleep.  No  one 
should  see  another  person  asleep;  it  seems 


The  London   Venture  49 

to  me  the  most  private  thing  in  the  world, 
and  if  I  were  a  man  and  a  woman  had 
watched  me  as  I  lay  asleep,  I  should  want 
to  kill  her  so  that  she  should  not  go  about 
and  tell  people  how  I  had  looked  as  I  lay 
stupidly  unconscious  of  everything  around 
me.  Only  once  I  have  seen  a  man  asleep, 
and  that  was  the  end  of  a  perfect  love  affair. 
I  had  suddenly  gone  to  see  him  in  his 
chambers,  and  when  his  man  showed  me 
into  his  room  I  found  him  lying  there  on 
the  sofa,  with  his  head  thrown  back  on  a 
cushion,  sleeping.  His  man  said  that  he 
must  be  very  tired  as  he  had  been  working 
all  night,  and  that  it  would  be  kind  of  me 
not  to  wake  him.  I  waited  in  the  room  for 
an  hour,  trying  not  to  look  at  him  but  to 
read  a  book,  but  his  breathing  filled  the  room 
and  I  could  not  take  my  eyes  away  from 
him ;  and  at  the  end  of  an  hour  I  felt  that  my 
love  had  gone  from  me  minute  by  minute 
as  I  had  looked  at  him,  and  that  now  I  might 
just  as  well  get  up  and  go  away,  for  I  did 
not  care  any  longer  if  he  was  asleep  or  awake. 
So  I  went  away,  but  I  do  not  know  if  he 
woke  up  as  the  door  closed  behind  me." 


50  The  London   Venture 

"And  did  you  ever  tell  him  why  you  had 
ceased  to  love  him1?"  I  asked. 

"I  couldn't  do  that,"  she  said,  "because 
if  he  had  not  understood  me  I  should  have 
hated  him,  and  I  do  not  like  hating  people 
whom  I  have  loved.  But  now  I  dine  with 
him  from  time  to  time,  and  I  can  see  that  he 
is  still  wondering  how  it  was  that  on  Mon- 
day I  loved  him  and  on  Tuesday  I  didn't." 

As  we  walked  through  the  Park  towards 
the  Park  Lane  gates,  it  seemed  to  me  won- 
derful that  this  day,  one  among  many  days, 
should  already  be  passing,  irrevocably,  and 
that  what  we  had  said  and  what  we  had  felt 
as  we  sat  on  chairs  in  the  sun  would  never 
be  repeated,  would  never  come  again  except 
perhaps  in  a  different  way  and  with  different 
surprises.  And  when  I  asked  her  if  she  felt 
the  happiness  of  the  afternoon,  she  laughed 
slightly  and  said  that  she  liked  the  Park  this 
spring  afternoon.  "It  is  perfect  now,"  she 
said,  "but  when  we  come  here  in  a  month's 
or  two  months'  time  it  will  be  too  warm  to 
sit  in  the  sun  and  talk  about  love  and  Henry 
James,  and  in  the  autumn  we  will  sit  down 
for  a  moment  and  shiver  a  little  and  pity 


The  London   Venture  51 

the  brown  leaves  falling,  and  in  the  winter 
we  will  walk  quickly  through  because  it  will 
be  too  cold;  and  then  in  Park  Lane  you  will 
put  me  into  a  taxi  and  stand  by  the  door 
with  your  hat  in  your  hand,  and  say  good- 
bye. For  the  seasons  will  have  gone  round, 
and  we  shall  each  have  given  what  the  other 
will  take,  and  when  I  look  at  you  you  will 
be  different,  and  when  you  look  at  me  you 
will  not  see,  as  you  see  now,  my  eyes  looking 
far  away  over  your  shoulder,  and  you  will 
not  wonder  what  it  is  that  I  am  looking  at. 
For  then,  as  you  stand  by  the  door  of  the 
taxi  and  smile  your  good-bye  at  me,  the  end 
will  have  come,  and  there  will  be  nothing 
to  look  at  in  the  distance  over  your  shoulders. 
And  next  year  you  will  be  an  'old  friend,' 
and  I  shall  ring  you  up  and  say  that  I  am 
very  sorry  I  can't  lunch  and  walk  in  the  Park 
with  you  that  day  because  an  Oxfordish 
young  man  has  fallen  in  love  with  me,  and 
it  will  be  amusing  to  see  what  sort  of  lunch 
he  will  order  when  he  is  in  love. 

"But  is  a  rose  less  beautiful  because  it 
is  sure  to  die*?"  she  said. 

But  the  winter  she  spoke  of  was  not  of 


52  The  London   Venture 

the  seasons,  for  it  rushed  incontinently  in 
upon  us  between  the  summer  and  the  au- 
tumn, and  I,  too,  was  delicately  added  to 
the  sedate  statuary  of  Shelmerdene's  "old 
friends.   .   .   ." 

And  now  I  am  in  this  strange  library 
whose  rows  of  books  stare  so  unfamiliarly 
at  me.  The  table  at  which  I  write  is  by  the 
big  French  windows,  and  I  must  be  careful 
to  keep  my  elbows  from  sprawling  as  they 
would,  for  everything  is  covered  with  dust, 
and  if  I  were  fussy  and  wiped  it  away  I 
should  raise  a  great  cloud  of  it  around  my 
head.  .  .  .  All  is  quiet  and  leisurely  this 
morning.  Outside  there  is  no  sun  or  mild- 
ness to  make  me  restless  and  self-conscious 
about  my  laziness ;  it  is  one  of  those  days  on 
which  one  need  not  think  of  doing  anything 
which  will  be  "good  for  one,"  and  until 
about  tea-time  the  outside  world  will  be 
better  to  look  at  than  to  breathe.  For  the 
windows  show  me  a  very  dark,  wet-laden 
garden,  and  the  steady  rain  falling  among 
the  last  leaves  of  the  trees  and  their  myriad 
dead  comrades  on  the  grass  and  gravel  makes 
that    "swish"    which   comes   so   coolly   and 


The  London   Venture  53 

pleasantly  to  ears  which  need  not  be  wet 
with  it.  But  at  about  five  o'clock,  if  the 
rain  has  stopped  by  then,  I  shall  go  out  and 
walk  about  the  garden  for  an  hour  or  so;  I 
shall  walk  to  the  top  of  the  Divvil  Mound, 
which  lies  above  half  the  county  to  the  west 
and,  on  a  fine  day,  gives  your  eyes  a  rugged 
length  of  the  distant  Cheviots,  and  there  I 
shall  look  up  to  the  sky  and  draw  in  long 
draughts  of  the  fresh  rain-scented  air,  and 
feel  that  I  shall  never  be  ill  again  in  all  my 
life;  and  as  I  walk  back  under  the  trees  the 
wet  will  drip  on  to  me  and  I  shall  splash 
myself  here  and  there;  but  I  shall  not  swear, 
for  my  clothes  are  done  for  the  day,  and 
when  I  get  in  I  shall  have  a  bath  and  change, 
and  feel  all  new  and  clean  for  whatever  the 
evening  may  bring. 

Beside  me  now  is  an  envelope  with  an 
American  stamp,  and  the  vaguely  woebe- 
gone look  which  readdressed  envelopes  have; 
for  it  followed  me  here  some  ten  days  ago 
from  London,  reaching  me  the  same  morning 
that  I  sat  down  to  write  this  (for  it  has 
taken  me  more  than  a  week  of  long  mornings 
to  write  these  few  thousand  words)  which 


54  The  London   Venture 

was  at  first  to  have  been  an  essay  on  London, 
but  seems  now  to  have  fallen  into  the  state 
of  a  personal  confession.  Many  times  I 
have  taken  out  this  letter  and  re-read  it,  for 
it  is  a  strange  letter,  such  a  one  as  a  man 
may  receive  only  once  in  his  life.  This  let- 
ter needs  no  answer,  for  it  is  dead  like  the 
person  who  sent  it;  and  that  the  sender 
should  not  now  care  if  I  read  it  or  not  gives 
me  a  queer  feeling  of  triviality;  for  in  her 
letter  she  asks  me  to  write  back,  not  know- 
ing then  that  a  letter  from  a  dead  person  is 
the  only  sort  one  need  not  answer  without 
blame  or  reproach. 

The  day  has  long  passed  when,  if  you 
felt  inclined,  you  could  moralise  on  death 
and  the  frailty  of  human  life  to  your  heart's 
content  and  be  sure  of  a  hearing.  I  am 
sorry  that  the  commonplaces  on  death  find 
now  only  impatient  readers,  for  they  make 
pleasant  reading  in  the  pioneer  essayists 
from  poor  Overbury  to  Steele;  for  death, 
with  all  its  embroideries  and  trappings  of 
destiny  and  Nemesis,  is  a  pretty  way  of 
exercising  that  philosophy  which  no  one  is 
without.    I  envy  the  courage  of  the  man  who 


The  London   Venture  55 

could  now  write  an  essay  "On  Death"  as 
Bacon  did  once,  laying  down  the  law  of  it 
with  no  hint  of  an  apology  for  the  monotony 
of  his  subject;  but  there  is  now  no  essayist 
or  philosopher  with  the  calm  and  aloof  assur- 
ance and  arrogance  of  a  Bacon,  that  you 
might  see,  after  the  last  written  words  on 
the  most  trivial  theme,  this  last  seal,  as 
though  he  were  God,  "Thus  thought  Francis 
Bacon."  But  of  death  there  is  nothing 
trivial  and  pleasant  left  to  be  said,  and  as 
a  subject  it  has  grown  monotonous,  except 
for  the  inevitable  slayer  and  the  slain,  and 
that  prevalent  instinct  for  fair  play  ("the 
essential  quality  of  the  looker-on")  which 
interests  itself  in  the  manner  of  the  slaying. 
But  this  letter  has  seemed  strange  to  me 
because,  perhaps,  I  shall  never  again  receive 
a  letter  whose  writer  is  dead,  and  who,  when 
writing  it,  dreamt  of  all  material  things  but 
death.  Were  I  Oscar  Wilde  I  might  wonder 
now  if  English-women  who  die  in  America 
come  back  to  London;  for  there  is  much  of 
London  in  the  letter:  "I  should  like  to  be 
in  London  to-day — Bloomsbury  London, 
Mayfair  London,  Chelsea  London,  London 


56  The  London  Venture 

of  the  small  restaurants  and  large  draughts 
of  wine,  London  of  the  intellectual  half- 
lights,  drone  of  flippant  phrases  and  racy 
epigrams,  with  a  thin  fog  outside;  London 
of  a  resigned  good  humour,  of  modulated 
debauch  moving  like  her  traffic,  strips  of 
colour  through  dusk,  and  drab,  optimistic, 
noisy  solitude,  tranquillity  of  incessant 
sound:  autumn  lamplight,  busy  park,  sheep, 
men,  women,  prostitutes:  doors  slamming, 
people  coming  in  and  sitting  by  the  fire, 
more  cigarettes,  cakes,  shops,  myriads  of 
people.  .  .  ." 

But  I  would  not  like  to  be  in  London 
this  month  of  November. 


The  London  Venture:   IV 


IV 

BUT  there  was  once  a  month  of  Novem- 
ber, about  which  I  could  not  so 
grandly  say  that  I  would  not  like  to  spend 
it  in  London ;  for  something  happened  which 
threw  me  in  a  great  hurly-burly  of  change 
into  an  uncomfortable  little  flat  in  Monday 
Road,  which  is  in  South  Kensington,  but 
for  all  the  life  and  gaiety  there  is  in  it  might 
just  as  well  be  in  a  scrubby  corner  of  the 
Sahara  on  a  dusty  day.  My  father  had  died 
suddenly,  and  what  little  question  there  was 
of  my  ever  going  into  business  now  dropped 
away,  so  I  had  to  make  at  least  a  pretence 
of  earning  my  living,  or,  rather,  of  making 
a  career  for  myself.  I  was  very  definite 
about  this,  that  I  must  do  something,  be 
something;  for  I  had  learnt  this  much  of  the 
world,  that  there  is  no  room  in  it  for  casual 
comers,  that  a  man  must  have  a  background 
(any    background    will    do,    but    the   more 

individual  the  better) ;  that  there  is  no  room 

59 


60  The  London   Venture 

in  any  part  soever  of  the  social  scale  for  a 
man  who  is  just  nothing  at  all ;  and  as  I  have 
never  seriously  contemplated  living  exclu- 
sively in  the  company  of  landladies  and  their 
friends,  I  saw  that  I  must  put  my  back  into 
it  and  cease  being  a  very  insignificant  rentier. 
I  couldn't  bear  the  idea  of  going  through 
life  as  just  a  complacent  Armenian  in  a 
world  where  millions  and  millions  of  others 
were  trying  honestly  and  otherwise  to  climb 
up  the  greasy  pole  of  respectable  attainment. 
But  I  cannot  resist  saying  what  I  think  of 
Monday  Road,  though  I  am  sure  I  can  do  it 
no  harm,  because  better  men  than  I  must 
have  hated  it,  and  more  virulently.  Mon- 
day Road,  like  all  the  other  roads  which  sink 
their  mutual  differences  into  the  so  dreary 
Fulham  Road,  consists  of  large,  equal-faced 
houses  stuck  together  in  two  opposite  rows 
which  are  separated  by  about  fifteen  yards  or 
so  of  second-hand  Tarmac;  a  road  like  an- 
other, you  will  mildly  say,  but  you  cannot 
possibly  realise  its  dismal  grimness  if  you 
have  not  lived  there.  The  people  who  live 
in  the  angular-faced  houses  are  artists  who 
believe    in    art    for     art's    sake — else    they 


The  London   Venture  61 

wouldn't  be  forced  to  live  in  the  dismalest 
street  in  the  world — amateur  intellectuals 
like  myself,  and  various  sorts  of  women. 
The  tribe  of  organ-grinders  have  a  great 
weakness  for  Monday  Road,  probably  be- 
cause some  tactless  ass  has  stuck  up  a  notice 
there  that  "Barrel-organs  are  prohibited," 
which  is  a  silly  thing  to  say  if  you  can't 
enforce  it.  Altogether  it  is  the  sort  of  road 
in  which  a  "spinster  lady"  might  at  any 
moment  lock  her  door,  close  her  windows, 
turn  on  the  gas,  and  read  a  novel  to  death. 
A  woman  in  the  fiat  next  to  mine  did  that  a 
week  after  I  arrived,  and  I  have  never  viewed 
death  more  sympathetically. 

When  men  grow  old  they  are  apt  to  dis- 
cover pleasant  memories  attached  even  to 
the  worst  periods,  as  they  thought  them  at 
the  time,  of  their  lives.  I  am  not  very  old 
as  yet,  but  looking  back  calmly  on  the  eigh- 
teen months  I  spent  in  South  Kensington,  I 
can  find  here  and  there,  through  an  exagger- 
ated cloud  of  depression  and  wretchedness, 
a  pleasant  memory  smiling  reprovingly  at 
me;  as  though,  perhaps,  I  should  not  be 
treacherous  to  the  good  hours  God  or  my 


62  The  London  Venture 

luck  had  given  me.  .  .  .  And  there  was  one 
moment  of  them  all,  when,  in  the  first  dark- 
ness of  an  early  autumn  night,  a  dim  slight 
figure  stood  mysteriously  on  my  doorstep, 
and  I  blinked  childishly  at  it  because  I  did 
not  know  who  the  figure  was  nor  how  it  had 
come  there — if  indeed  it  had  come  at  all, 
and  I  had  not  dreamed  the  ring  of  the  bell 
which  had  startled  me  out  of  my  book.  Or, 
perhaps,  she  had  made  a  mistake,  hadn't 
come  for  me  at  all.  .  .  . 

But  when  she  spoke,  asking  for  me,  I 
began  to  remember  her,  but  only  her  voice, 
for  I  could  not  see  her  face  which  was  hid- 
den in  the  high  fur  collar  of  an  evening 
cloak.  She  looked  so  mysterious  that  I 
didn't  want  to  remember  where  I  had  seen 
her. 

"I  simply  can't  bear  it,"  she  said  nerv- 
ously, "if  you  don't  remember  me.  I'll  go 
away."  And  she  turned  her  head  quickly 
to  the  gates  where  there  stood  the  thick  dark 
shape  of  a  taxi  which  I  had  somehow  not 
seen  before,  else  I  would  have  known  for 
certain  that  she  was  not  a  fairy,  a  Lilith 
fairy,  but  just  a  woman;  a  nice  woman  who 


The  London  Venture  63 

takes  life  at  a  venture,  I  decided,  and  said 
abruptly:  "Don't  go." 

When  we  were  upstairs  in  my  sitting- 
room  and  I  could  see  her  by  the  light  of  eight 
candles,  I  remembered  her  perfectly  well, 
though  I  had  only  seen  her  once  before.  We 
had  met  at  some  tiresome  bridge  party  six 
months  before,  but  just  incidentally,  and 
without  enough  interest  on  either  side  to 
carry  the  conversation  beyond  the  tepid 
limits  of  our  surroundings.  And  as  I  had 
never  once  thought  of  her  since  I  had  shaken 
myself  free  of  them,  I  couldn't  imagine  how 
on  earth  she  had  known  my  address  or  even 
remembered  my  name,  which  she  didn't  dare 
try  to  pronounce,  she  had  told  me  as  we 
went  up  the  stairs. 

She  said  that  she,  too,  had  never  thought 
about  me  at  all  since  then,  "until  to-night 
when  I  was  playing  bridge  in  the  same  room 
with  the  same  people,  except  that  you  were 
not  there — and  I  remembered  you  only  sud- 
denly, as  something  missing  from  the  room. 
I  didn't  remember  you  because  of  anything 
you  said,  but  because  you  had  been  the  worst 
bridge  player  in  the  room,  and  had  the  most 


64  The  London   Venture 

unscrupulous  brown  eyes  that  ever  advised 
a  flapper  to  inhale  her  cigarette  smoke,  as 
it  was  no  use  her  smoking  if  she  didn't.  And 
thinking  about  you  among  those  people  who 
seemed  more  dreary  than  ever  to-night,  I  had 
a  silly  homesick  feeling  about  you  as  though 
we  were  comrades  in  distress,  whereas  I 
didn't  even  know  your  name  properly  and 
never  shall  if  you  don't  somehow  make  it  a 
presentable  one. 

"So  I  turned  the  conversation  to  Ar- 
menians in  general,  which  is  an  easy  thing 
to  do,  because  you  have  only  to  murmur  the 
word  'massacre'  and  the  connection  is 
obvious,  isn't  it?  Of  course  that  sent  that 
dear  old  snob,  Mrs. ,  off  like  mad,  say- 
ing what  bad  luck  it  was  for  you  being  an 
Armenian,  because  you  could  so  nicely  have 
been  anything  else,  and  even  a  Montenegrin 
would  have  been  a  better  thing  to  be;  how 
surprised  she  had  been  when  she  met  you, 
she  told  us,  for  she  had  always  had  a  vague 
idea  that  Armenians  were  funny  little  old 
men  with  long  hooked  noses  and  greasy  black 
hair,    who   hawked  carpets   about  on   their 


The  London   Venture  65 

backs,  and  invariably  cheated  people,  even 
Jews  and  Greeks  .  .  . 

"But  you  are  quite  English  and  civilised 
really,  aren't  you1?  I  mean  you  don't  think 
that,  just  because  I  managed  to  wrangle  out 
your  address  and  came  here  on  impulse,  I 
want  to  stay  with  you  or  anything  like  that, 
do  you?" 

As  she  said  that,  I  suddenly  thought  of 
Lord  Dusiote's  gallant  villainy  in  Meredith's 
poem,  and  I  told  her  quickly  how  a  whole 
Court  had  been  lovesick  for  a  young  prin- 
cess, but  Lord  Dusiote  had  laughed,  heart- 
free,  and  said: 

"I  prize  her  no  more  than  a  fling  of  the  dice, 
But  oh,  shame  to  my  manhood,  a  lady  of  ice, 
We  master  her  by  craft !" 

"But  I  seem  to  remember  that  my  Lord 
Dusiote  came  to  a  bad  end,"  she  laughed  at 
me. 

"Not  so  bad  an  end — it  must  have  been 
worth  it.  And  at  least  he  died  for  a  mis- 
take,  which  is  better  than  living  on  one: 


66  The  London   Venture 

"  'All  cloaked  and  masked,  with  naked  blades, 
That  flashed  of  a  judgment  done, 
The  lords  of  the  Court,  from  the  palace-door, 
Came  issuing  forth,  bearers  four, 
And  flat  on  their  shoulders  one.'  " 

But  Lord  Dusiote's  gallant  death  left  her 
quite  cold,  for  she  was  suddenly  by  the 
bookcase,  running  caressing  fingers  over  a 
binding  here  and  there. 

"What  perfectly  divine  books  you  have! 
I  shall  read  them  all,  and  give  up  Ethel  M. 
Dell  for  good — but  you  are  probably  one 
of  those  stuffy  people  who  'take  care'  of 
their  books  and  never  lend  them  to  any  one 
because  they  are  first  editions  or  some  such 
rubbish." 

"You  can  have  them  all,"  I  said,  "and 
you  can  turn  up  the  corner  of  every  page  if 
you  like,  and  you  can  spill  tea  on  every  cover 
or  you  can  use  them  as  table  props,  because 
all  these  books  from  Chaucer  to  Pater  are 
absolute  nonsense  at  this  moment,  for  in 
not  one  of  them  is  there  anything  about  a 
dark-haired  young  woman  with  blue  eyes 
and  a  tentative  mouth,  and  the  indolent 
caress  of  a  Latin  ancestress  somewhere  in  her 


The  London   Venture  67 

voice,  standing  on  a  doorstep  in  a  dingy 
road,  calling  on  a  man  who  might  quite 
easily  be  a  murderer,  for  all  you  know." 

But  enough  of  that,  for  the  situation  of 
a  young  man  and  a  young  woman  in  a  third- 
floor  flat  miles  away  from  anywhere  that 
mattered,  at  eleven  o'clock  on  such  a  warm 
autumn  night  as  makes  all  things  seem  un- 
real and  beautiful,  is  a  situation  with  a  beard 
on  it,  so  to  speak. 

When  I  first  knew  Phyllis,  though  al- 
ways candid,  she  was  inclined  to  be  rather 
"county,"  the  sort  of  woman  "whose  people 
are  all  Service  people,  you  know";  she  lived 
with  her  mother,  near  Chester  Square,  who 
at  first  disliked  me  because  I  was  not  in  the 
Brigade  of  Guards,  but  later  grew  quite 
pleasantly  used  to  me  since  I,  unlike  the 
Brigade  of  Guards,  it  seems,  did  at  least 
acknowledge  my  habitual  presence  in  her 
house  by  emptying  Solomon's  glory  into  her 
flower  vases;  and  if  there's  a  better  reason 
than  gratitude  for  getting  into  debt,  tell 
it  to  me,  please. 

But  Phyllis,  like  many  another  good 
woman  of  these  Liberal  times,  turned  her 


68  The  London  Venture 

bored  back  on  "county,"  and  only  remem- 
bered what  was  "done"  the  better  not  to  do 
it;  fought  for,  and  won  a  latchkey;  asserted 
her  right  to  come  home  at  night  as  late  as 
she  pleased,  and  how  she  pleased — for  she 
had  come  home  from  a  dance  one  night  on 
a  benevolent  motor  lorry,  which  she  had 
begged  to  pick  her  up  on  Piccadilly  in  pity 
for  her  "tired  bones,"  and  which,  in  cum- 
brously  dropping  her  at  mother's  door,  woke 
up  the  whole  street.  And  I  can  so  well 
imagine  Phyllis,  as  she  fitted  in  her  latchkey, 
murmuring,  languidly,  but  without  much 
conviction,  "What  fun  women  have  ..." 

But,  in  the  reaction  of  her  type  against 
the  preceding  age  of  Victoria,  she  went  to  the 
other  extreme; -saw  life  too  much  through 
the  medium  of  a  couple  of  absinthe  cock- 
tails before  each  meal,  and  sex  too  much  as 
though  it  were  entirely  a  joke,  which  it 
isn't  .  .  .  quite.  She  cut  her  hair  short, 
and  took  to  saying  "damn"  more  often  than 
was  strictly  necessary.  In  fact,  she  would 
have  been  quite  unbearable  if  she  hadn't 
been  pretty,  which  she  delightfully  was. 
And,    unlike    her   more    careless    sisters   of 


The  London  Venture  69 

Chelsea,  Hampstead,  and  Golders'  Green, 
she  did  not  make  the  terrible  mistake  of 
dressing  all  anyhow,  or  make  a  point  of  be- 
ing able  to  "put  up  with  anything";  such 
as,  sleeping  on  studio  floors  after  a  party,  in 
such  a  way  as  to  collect  the  maximum 
amount  of  candle  grease  and  spilled  drink 
on  her  skirts,  and  wearing  men's  discarded 
felt  hats,  cut  as  no  decent  man  would  be  seen 
alive  wearing  one,  and  Roger  Fry  sort  of 
blouses  which  don't  quite  make  two  ends 
meet  at  the  back,  and  carrying  queer  hand- 
bags made,  perhaps,  out  of  the  sole  of  a  Red 
Indian's  threadbare  moccasin  .  .  .  Bohe- 
mians indeed,  but  without  so  much  as  a  "Bo" 
anywhere  about  them! 

They  can  "stand  anything,"  as  they  have 
let  it  be  generally  known.  But,  by  dressing 
like  freaks  and  by  being  able  to  stand  any- 
thing, they  have  detracted  considerably  from 
their  attraction  for  men;  for  freaks  are  well 
enough  in  freak-land  but  look  rather  silly  in 
the  world  as  it  is — which  is  the  world  that 
matters,  after  all;  and  what  the  devil  is  the 
good  of  being  polite  and  making  a  fuss  of  a 
woman  if  she  tells  you  repeatedly  that  she 


70  The  London   Venture 

can  "stand  anything,"  and  much  prefers  the 
feeling  of  independence  fostered  by  lighting 
cigarettes  with  her  own  matches,  and  opening 
doors  with  her  own  so  unmanicured  fingers'? 

I  suddenly  realise  at  this  very  moment  of 
writing  why  those  months  in  South  Ken- 
sington seemed  so  overpoweringly  dismal, 
and  that  even  now  it  is  only  time  which  lends 
a  real  pleasure  to  the  memory  of  the  tall, 
dim  figure  (Mr.  Charles  Garvice  would 
have  called  her  "sylph-like."  I  wish  I  were 
Mr.  Garvice)  which  stood  on  my  doorstep 
on  an  autumn  night,  and  so  mysteriously 
asked  for  me.  For  that  beginning  had  a 
dreary  end,  as  indeed  all  endings  are  dreary 
if  the  silken  cord  is  not  swiftly  and  sharply 
cut,  thus  leaving  a  neat  and  wonderful  sur- 
prise, instead  of  the  long-drawn  ending  of 
frayed  edges  and  worn-out  emotions  which 
drive  quite  nice  young  men  into  a  premature 
cynicism  of  dotage. 

For  we  very  soon  tired  of  each  other,  and 
began  to  slip  away  into  our  different  lives 
with  a  great  deal  of  talk  about  our  "won- 
derful friendship";  though  we  both  of  us 
knew  very  well  that  there  is  nothing  left  to 


The  London   Venture  71 

eat  in  an  empty  oyster,  and  nothing  to  talk 
about  on  a  desert  island  except  how  deserted 
it  is,  and  nothing  to  look  forward  to  when 
you  have  too  quickly  reached  Ultima  Thule 
but  to  get  as  quickly  back  again  and  examine 
your  bruises — but  he  is  a  coward  who  hasn't 
enough  kick  left  in  him  to  begin  again  and 
repeat  his  mistake,  for  though  two  wrongs 
may  not  make  a  right,  three  or  four  mistakes 
of  this  sort  do  certainly  make  a  man.  .  .  . 
So  we  both  set  out  to  get  back  again,  but 
not  as  quickly  as  possible,  because  Phyllis  is 
a  woman,  and,  perhaps,  I  am  by  way  of  hav- 
ing a  few  manners  left — and,  therefore,  we 
had  to  take  the  longest  way  back;  and  were 
both  very  tired  and  bored  with  each  other 
when  at  last  I  suddenly  left  her  one  night 
after  dinner  at  her  house  at  half-past  nine, 
because  I  had  a  headache — "my  dear,  aspirin 
isn't  any  good,  really  it  isn't" — and  was 
sure  she  had  one,  too  .   .  . 

Six  months  ago  I  had  a  letter  from  her, 
saying  that  she  was  going  to  marry  a  nice 
fat  baronet,  a  real,  not  a  Brummagem  one, 
and  not  so  much  because  of  his  money,  but 
because  of  his  nice,  solid,  middle-class  ideas, 


72  The  London   Venture 

which  would  help  to  tone  down  hers.  Phyllis 
was  like  that,  and  I've  often  wondered  very 
much  about  that  wretched  baronet,  whether 
he  will  tone  her  down,  or  whether  she  will 
persuade  him  to  open  a  hat  shop  off  Bond 
Street  in  aid  of  a  "bus  conductors' " 
orphanage. 

Phyllis,  Phyllis,  you  really  can't  go 
through  life  with  half  a  cold  grouse  in  one 
hand  and  a  pint  of  Cliquot  '04  in  the  other. 
There  are  other  things  ...  so  they  say. 


The  London  Venture:   V 


IT  shames  me  a  little  to  confess  that  I 
have  always  fitted  in  my  friends  to  suit 
my  moods;  for  it  may  seem  superior  of  me, 
as  though  I  attached  as  much  importance  to 
my  moods  as  to  my  friends,  and  therefore  too 
much  to  the  former;  but  it  is  really  quite 
natural  and  human,  for  there  is  no  man,  be 
he  ever  so  strong,  who  does  not  somehow 
sway  to  his  moment's  mood;  as  a  great  liner 
imperceptibly  sways  to  the  lulling  roll  of 
the  seas — as  compared  to  myself,  a  rickety, 
rakish-looking  little  craft  which  goes  up  to 
the  skies  and  down  into  the  trough  to  the 
great  swing  of  those  mocking  waves — 
moods ! 

But  I,  as  I  say,  unlike  that  strong  man 
who  will  pretend  to  crush  his  mood  as  some 
trifling  temptation  to  relax  his  hold  on  life, 
I  am  so  sociable  a  person  that  I  must  give 
my  friends  every  side  of  myself  and  to  each 

friend  his  particular  side.     And,  though  I 

75 


76  The  London   Venture 

do  not  wish  to  seem  superior  I  have  so  far 
mastered  the  art  of  friendship,  of  which 
Whistler  made  such  a  grievous  mess,  that 
that  side  of  me  which  such  and  such  a  friend 
may  like  is  the  side  which  I  happen  to  wish 
to  show  to  him.  I  keep  it  for  him,  labelling 
it  his;  when  I  see  him  in  the  distance  I  say, 
"Dikran,  up  and  away  and  be  at  him";  for 
I  think  it  incumbent  on  people  who,  like 
myself,  are  not  really  significant,  to  be  at 
least  significant  in  their  relations  with  others, 
to  stand  out  as  something,  even  as  a  buffoon, 
among  their  acquaintances,  and  not  be  just 
part  of  the  ruck.  My  ideal  is,  of  course,  that 
splendid  person  of  Henry  James',  in  "The 
Private  Life,"  who  faded  away,  did  not 
exist,  when  he  was  alone,  but  was  wonder- 
fully and  variably  present  when  even  a 
chambermaid  was  watching  him.  That 
subtle,  ironic  creation  of  Henry  James'  is 
the  very  incarnation  of  a  Divine  Sociability, 
but  in  actual  life  there  is  no  artist  perfect 
enough  to  give  himself  so  wholly  to  others 
that  he  literally  does  not  exist  to  himself. 

I  am  not  selfish,  then,  with  my  moods; 
with  a  little  revision  and  polishing  I  can 


The  London   Venture  11 

make  them  presentable  enough  to  give  to  my 
friends  as,  to  say  vulgarly,  the  real  article, 
the  real  me.  And  of  them  all  there  is  one 
special  mood,  a  neutral-tinted,  tired,  scepti- 
cal thing,  which  I  have  come  to  reserve  exclu- 
sively for  my  friend  Nikolay,  who  lives  in  a 
studio  in  Fitzroy  Street,  and  faintly  despises 
people  for  living  anywhere  else. 

When  I  had  pressed  his  bell  I  had  to  step 
back  and  watch  for  his  face  at  the  third-floor 
window,  which,  having  emerged  and  grunted 
at  me  below,  would  dwindle  into  a  hand 
from  which  would  drop  the  latchkey  into 
my  upturned  hat.  Then  very  wearily — I 
had  to  live  up  to  my  mood,  you  see,  else  why 
visit  Nikolay1? — I  would  climb  the  stone 
steps  to  his  studio. 

Once  there,  I  resigned  myself  to  a  delicious 
and  conscious  indolence.  My  thoughts 
drifted  up  with  my  cigarette  smoke,  and 
faded  with  it.  My  special  place  was  on  the 
divan  in  the  corner  of  the  large  room,  under 
a  long  shelf  of  neatly  arranged  first  editions, 
from  which  I  would  now  and  again  pick  one, 
finger  it  lazily,  mutter  just  audibly  that  I 
had   bought   that   same   book   half-a-crown 


78  The  London   Venture 

cheaper,  and  relapse  into  silence.  If  uncon- 
genial visitors  dropped  in,  I  would  abuse 
Nikolay's  hospitality  by  at  once  turning  over 
on  my  left  side  and  going  to  sleep  until  they 
had  gone.  But  generally  no  one  came,  and 
we  were  alone  and  silent. 

From  the  divan  I  would  watch  Nikolay 
at  work  at  his  long  table  in  front  of  the  win- 
dow, through  which  could  be  seen  all  the 
chimneys  in  Fitzroy  Street,  Charlotte  Street, 
and  Tottenham  Court  Road.  How  he  could 
do  any  work  at  all  (and  work  of  colour!) 
with  the  drab  cosmopolitanism  of  this  view 
ever  before  his  eyes,  I  do  not  know;  myself 
would  have  to  be  very  drunk  before  I  could 
ignore  those  uncongenial  backs  of  houses  and 
chimneys,  stuck  up  in  the  air  like  the  grimy 
paws  of  a  gutter-brat  humanity.  For  an 
hour  on  end,  until  he  turned  to  me  and  said, 
"Tea,  Dikran1?"  I  would  watch  him  through 
my  smoke,  as  though  fascinated  by  the  bent, 
slight  figure  as  it  drew  and  painted,  with  so 
delicate  a  precision  of  movement,  those  un- 
real and  intangible  illustrations,  which  tried 
at  first  to  impress  one  by  their  drawing  or 
colouring,  but  seemed  to  me  mainly  expres- 


The  London   Venture  79 

sions  of  the  artist's  grim  and  ironic  detach- 
ment from  other  men;  a  macabre  observer, 
as  it  were,  of  their  passions,  himself  passion- 
less, but  widely,  almost  wickedly,  tolerant. 
An  erect  satyr  in  topsy-turvydom. 

If  it  were  any  other  man  than  Nikolay, 
I  would  know  him  well,  for  I  have  seen  much 
of  him,  but  one  knows  men  by  their  "points 
of  view,"  and  I  am  not  sure  that  Nikolay 
ever  had  one.  He  was,  or  rather  he  seemed 
definitely  to  be,  curiously  wise;  one  never  put 
his  wisdom  to  the  test;  one  never  heard  him 
say  an  overpoweringly  wise  thing,  but  there 
was  no  doubt  that  he  was  wise.  People  said 
he  was  wise.  Women  said  it.  A  strange 
man,  indeed;  queer,  and  a  little  sinister. 
Perhaps  six  hundred  years  ago  he  might  have 
been  an  alchemist  living  in  a  three-storied 
house  in  Prague,  exiled  from  his  native  land 
of  Russia  for  criticising  too  openly  the  size 
of  the  Czarina's  ears;  for  Nikolay  knows  no 
fear,  he  can  be  ruder  than  any  man  I  know. 
I  have  heard  him  answer  a  woman  that  her 
new  hat  didn't  suit  her  at  all.  "I  think  it 
is  a  rotten  hat,"  he  said,  and  the  vanity  of 
an  admitted  thirty  years  faded  from  her, 


80  The  London   Venture 

she  was  as  a  dejected  houri  before  the  re- 
pelling eyes  of  a  Salhadine. 

He  had  not  always  been  so  detached  and 
passionless.  Steps  of  folly  must  somehow 
have  led  up  to  that  philosophic  wisdom 
which  so  definitely  obtruded  on  the  con- 
sciousness; so  definitely,  indeed,  that  I  have 
watched  women,  as  we  perhaps  sat  round  the 
card-table  in  his  studio,  and  seen  them  in 
their  manner  defer  to  him,  as  though  he  were 
a  great  man  in  the  eyes  of  the  world,  which 
he  isn't.  But  to  be  treated  as  a  great  man, 
even  by  women,  when  you  are  not  a  great 
man,  is  indeed  the  essence  of  greatness! 
Bravo,  Nikolay!  I  see  you,  not  as  I  have 
always  seen  you,  but  in  Paris,  where  rumour 
tells  of  you;  in  Paris,  where  your  art  was 
your  hobby  and  life  your  serious  business, 
and  a  dress  suit  the  essential  of  your  visibil- 
ity of  an  evening. 

I  feel  riot  and  revelry  somewhere  in  you, 
Nikolay;  the  dim  green  lights  of  past  experi- 
ences do  very  queerly  mock  the  wisdom  in 
your  contemplative  eye.  I  am  to  suppose, 
then,  that  you  have  seen  other  things  than 
the  rehearsals  of  a  ballet,  have  marvelled  at 


The  London   Venture  81 

other  things  than  the  architecture  of  Spanish- 
Gothic  cathedrals'?  Ah,  I  have  the  secret 
of  you!  You  are  a  mediaeval,  a  knight  of 
old  exotic  times,  a  Sir  Lancelot  without 
naivete.  Now,  as  the  years  take  you,  it  is 
only  in  your  drawings  that  your  mind  runs 
cynically  riot  among  the  indiscretions  of 
literature — what  a  sinister  inner  gleam  I 
espied  in  you  when  you  told  me  that  you 
were  going  to  illustrate  the  poems  of  Fran- 
cois Villon!  But  in  Paris,  long  ago,  I  see 
you,  Nikolay,  standing  in  the  curtained  door- 
way of  a  cushion-spread  studio,  where  the 
lights  shine  faintly  through  the  red  ara- 
besques patterned  on  the  black  lamp  shades. 
I  see  you  standing  there  with  a  half-empty 
glass  of  Courvoisier  in  your  hand,  sip- 
ping, and  watching,  and  smiling  .  .  .  And 
women,  perhaps — nay!  a  princess  for  very 
certain,  it  is  said — running  wild  over  the 
immobility  of  your  face,  immobile  even 
through  those  first  perfervid  years. 

But  it  did  not  always  happen  that  I  found 
him  working  at  his  table  by  the  window. 
Sometimes  he  would  be  pacing  restlessly  up 
and  down  the  room,  and  round  the  card- 


82  The  London   Venture 

table  in  the  centre  (which  was  also  a  lunch, 
tea,  and  dinner  table). 

"I  have  never  before  been  four  years  in 
one  place,"  he  said.  "I  have  never  been  six 
months  in  one  place."  He  related  it  as  a 
possibly  interesting  fact,  not  as  a  cavil 
against  circumstances.  It  shows  what  little 
I  knew  of,  or  about,  him,  that  I  had  never 
before  heard  of  his  travels. 

"But  how  have  you  ever  done  any  work 
if  you  never  stayed  in  one  place,  never  settled 
down?' 

"Settled  down!"  He  stopped  in  his  walk 
and  fixed  on  me  with  a  disapproving  eye. 
"That's  a  nasty  bad  word,  Dikran.  The 
being-at-home  feeling  is  a  sedative  to  all  art 
and  progress.-  In  the  end  it  kills  imagina- 
tion. It  is  a  soporific,  a — what  you  call  it? 
— a  dope.  There's  a  feeling  of  contentment 
in  being  at  home,  and  you  can't  squeeze  any 
creation  out  of  contentment. 

"Permanent  homes,"  he  said,  "were  in- 
vented because  men  wanted  safety.  The 
safety  of  expectation!  Imagination  is  a 
curse  to  most  men ;  they  are  not  comfortable 
with  it;  they  think  it  is  unsettling.     Life  is 


The  London   Venture  83 

an  experiment  until  you  have  a  home,  and 
feel  that  it  is  a  home.  Men  like  that.  They 
like  the  idea  of  having  a  definite  pillow  on 
which  to  lay  their  heads  every  night,  of  hav- 
ing a  definite  woman,  called  a  wife,  beside 
them.  .  .  .  Bah!  Charity  begins  at  home, 
and  inertia  stays  there.  Safety  doesn't 
breed  art  or  progress — and  when  it  does,  it 
miscarries — the  Royal  Academy  .  .  . 

"Men  want  homes,"  he  said,  "because 
they  want  wives.  And  they  generally  want 
wives  because  they  don't  want  to  be  worried 
by  the  sex-feeling  any  more.  They  don't 
want  women  left  to  their  own  imagination 
any  more.  They  want  the  thing  over  and 
done  with  for  ever  and  ever.  Safety !  Men 
are  not  adventurous.  .  .  ." 

He  turned  to  me  sharply.  "Look  at 
you!"  he  said.  "Have  you  done  anything? 
Since  I  have  known  you,  you  have  done  noth- 
ing but  write  self-conscious  essays  which 
"The  New  Age"  tolerates;  you  have  played 
about  with  life  as  you  have  with  literature,  as 
though  it  were  all  a  question  of  commas  and 
semi-colons  .  .  .  You  have  tried  to  idealise 
love-affairs  into  a  pretty  phrase,  and  in  your 


84  The  London   Venture 

spare  time  you  lie  on  that  divan  and  look  up 
at  the  ceiling  and  dream  of  the  luxurious 
vices  of  Heliogabalus.  .  .  .  You  are  hor- 
ribly lazy,  not  adventurous  at  all.  What's 
it  matter  if  your  cuffs  get  dirty  as  long  as 
your  hands  get  hold  of  something*?" 

"One  can  always  change  one's  shirt,  if 
that  is  what  you  suggest,  Nikolay.  But  you 
are  wrong  about  my  not  being  adventurous — 
I  shall  adventure  many  things.  But  not 
sensationally,  you  know.  I  mean,  I  can't 
look  at  myself  straight,  I  can  only  look  at 
myself  sideways;  and  that  perhaps  is  just 
as  well  for  I  overlook  many  things  in  myself 
which  it  is  good  to  overlook,  and  I  can  smile 
at  things  which  James  Joyce  would  write  a 
book  about.  -And  when  I  write  a  novel — 
for  of  course  I  will  write  one,  since  England 
expects  every  young  man  to  write  a  novel — 
the  quality  I  shall  desire  in  it  will  be,  well, 
fastidiousness.  ...  I  come  from  the  East; 
I  shall  go  to  the  East;  I  shall  try  to  strike 
the  literary  mean  between  the  East  and  the 
West  in  me — between  my  Eastern  mind  and 
Western  understanding.  It  will  be  a  great 
adventure." 


The  London   Venture  85 

"The  East  is  a  shambles,"  he  said  shortly. 
And  in  that  sentence  lay  my  own  condemna- 
tion of  my  real  self;  if  any  hope  of  fame 
ever  lay  in  me,  I  suddenly  realised,  it  was 
in  that  acquired  self  which  had  been  to  a 
public  school  and  thought  it  not  well  bred 
to  have  too  aggressive  a  point  of  view.  Oh, 
but  what  nonsense  it  all  was!  I  lazily 
thought — this  striving  after  fame  and  no- 
toriety in  a  despairing  world. 

I  looked  at  Nikolay,  who  had  done  all 
the  talking  he  would  do  that  day,  and  was 
now  sitting  in  an  arm-chair  and  staring 
thoughtfully  at  the  floor;  thoughtfully,  I 
say,  but  perhaps  it  was  vacantly,  for  his  face 
was  a  mask,  as  weird,  in  its  way,  as  those 
fiendish  masks  which  he  delighted  in  making. 
And,  as  I  watched  him  like  this,  I  would  say 
to  myself  that,  if  I  watched  long  enough,  I 
would  be  sure  to  surprise  something;  but  I 
never  surprised  anything  at  all,  for  he  would 
surprise  me  looking  at  him,  and  his  sudden 
genial  smile  would  bring  him  back  into  the 
world  of  men,  leaving  me  nothing  but  the 
skeleton  of  a  guilty  and  ludicrous  fancy;  and 
of   my  many  ludicrous   fancies   about   my 


86  The  London   Venture 

friend  this  was  indeed  the  most  ludicrous, 
for  I  had  caught  myself  thinking  that  he  was 
not  really  a  man  at  all,  but  just  part  of  a 
drawing  by  Felicien  Rops.  .  .  . 


The  London  Venture:   VI 


VI 

FROM  my  flat  in  Monday  Road  to  Pic- 
cadilly Circus  was  a  long  way, -and  the 
first  part  of  it  wearisome  enough  through  the 
Fulham  Road,  with  its  cancer  and  consump- 
tion hospitals,  its  out-of-the-centre  dinginess, 
its  thrifty,  eager-looking,  dowdy  women,  and 
its  decrepit  intellectuals  slouching  along 
with  their  heads  twisted  over  their  shoulders 
looking  back  for  a  bus,  on  the  top  of  which 
they  will  sit  with  an  air  of  grieved  and  bitter 
dislike  of  the  people  near  them.  But  at 
Hyde  Park  Corner  I  would  get  off  the  bus, 
for  I  have  a  conventional  fondness  for  Pic- 
cadilly, and  like  to  walk  the  length  of  it  to 
the  Circus. 

I  like  to  walk  on  the  Green  Park  side ;  in 
summer  because  of  the  fresh,  green,  rustling 
trees,  an  unhurried  pleasaunce  in  London's 
chaotic  noises,  and  in  winter  because  I  like 
nothing  better  than  to  look  at  leaf-stripped 

trees  standing  nakedly  against  a  grey  sky, 

89 


90  The  London   Venture 

finger-posts  of  Nature  pointing  to  the  real 
No-Man's  Land,  and  illustrating  the  miracu- 
lous wonder  of  being  just  beautiful,  as  no 
man-made  thing  can  be;  for  all  things  made 
by  man,  a  picture,  or,  if  you  like,  a  woman's 
shoes  with  heels  of  stained  majolica,  have  an 
aim  and  a  purpose.  They  lack  the  futility, 
of  which  Nature  alone  has  the  secret,  of  be- 
ing just  carelessly  beautiful.  When  I  say 
Nature,  I  do  not  see  the  Dame  Nature  of 
Oscar  Wilde's  crooked  vision,  a  crude,  slat- 
ternly charwoman,  but  a  spendthrift  prodi- 
gal, spending  for  the  sheer  love  of  spending; 
he  takes  every  man  by  the  sleeve,  and  with 
delicious  good  manners  he  makes  it  seem 
that  he  values  your  opinion  above  all  others, 
that  he  has  created  the  beauty  of  the  world 
to  please  in  particular  your  eye,  that  you 
will  sadly  disappoint  him  if  you  hint  that 
you  hadn't  much  liked  the  tinge  of  ver- 
milion in  yestreen's  sunset,  for  he  had 
touched  in  that  vermilion  just  to  give  you  a 
pleasant  surprise. 

Thus  it  is  with  Nature  and  myself;  I  see 
him  as  an  old  beau,  given  to  leering  in  cities, 
but  frank  and  natural  in  open  places.     And 


The  London   Venture  91 

he  knows  me  well,  too;  knows  I  am  no  minor 
poet,  no  poet  at  all,  in  fact,  and,  therefore, 
not  to  be  gulled  by  insincere  sunsets  and 
valleys  without  shade  or  colour;  that  the 
idea  of  a  fawn  skipping  about  where  I  don't 
expect  him,  far  from  causing  in  me  a  metri- 
cal paroxysm  after  Mr.  Robert  Nichols, 
frankly  bores  me;  he  has  shown  me  an  odd 
nymph  here  and  there,  but  I  haven't  en- 
couraged him.  .  .  .  They  are  so  intangible, 
I  thought,  and  they  faded  away.  So  at  last, 
in  desperation,  he  stuck  up  a  naked  tree 
against  a  grey  sky,  and  I  thought  it  beauti- 
ful. It  is  a  matter  entirely  between  the  old 
beau  and  myself.  For  all  I  care,  you  may 
think  my  stripped  tree  a  stupid  old  tree,  but 
to  me  it  is  beautiful.     I  see  life  that  way. 

But  the  day  I  am  thinking  of,  when  I  got 
off  the  bus  at  Hyde  Park  Corner,  was  towards 
the  end  of  October,  when  oysters  have  al- 
ready become  a  commonplace;  and  as  I 
walked  up  the  Green  Park  side,  the  path 
around  me  was  strewn  with  brown  and  red 
and  faded  green  leaves,  the  last  sacrifice  of 
autumn  to  winter.  I  wondered  why  all 
things  did  not  die  as  beautifully  and  as  nat- 


92  The  London  Venture 

urally  as  autumn  dies.  If  all  things  died  like 
that,  there  would  be  no  fear  in  the  world,  and 
a  world  without  fear  would  be  just  a  splendid 
adventure,  and  life  would  be  like  chasing 
a  sunset  to  the  Antipodes — it  would  dis- 
appear only  to  appear  again,  more  wonder- 
fully. 

But  the  fear  of  the  shapeless  bogey  be- 
hind existence  has  been  the  peculiar  gift  of 
God;  for  so  long  He  has  chosen  to  be 
secretive  about  death,  and  the  secret  of  it  is 
in  the  eating  of  the  last  remaining  apple 
on  the  Tree  of  Knowledge.  But,  O  God,  it 
is  all  a  vain  secrecy,  this  about  death.  Man 
was  not  made  to  be  so  easily  satisfied.  Edu- 
cation may  have  made  him  ignorant,  but  he 
was  born  inquisitive.  Some  day,  some  day, 
a  more  subtle  and  less  solid  Conan  Doyle 
will  arise,  and  valiantly  catch  a  too  indis- 
creet ancestral  ghost,  and  holloa  to  a  pro- 
fessor to  X-ray  his  astral  vitals,  to  find  out 
by  what  means  and  processes  came  a  living 
man  to  be  a  dead  man  and  then  an  ancestral 
ghost.  Their  discoveries  will  then  be  written 
down  in  the  form  of  a  memoir  and  made  into 
a  fat  book,  complete  with  a  spiritual  preface 


The  London   Venture  93 

and  an  astral  index,  and  will  cause  a  great 
stir  in  the  world.  But  it  will  be  a  great 
shame  on  the  Tree  of  Knowledge  to  have  its 
last  apple  knocked  down  from  it  by  a  paltry 
book. 

This  last  week  or  so  of  autumn  is  the 
time  of  all  times  when  the  fanatic  hermit, 
sitting  alone  in  his  desert  place,  should  be 
tolerant  of  the  world's  frailty.  If  such  an 
one  would  let  me,  a  worldly  enough  young 
man,  approach  him,  I  would  tell  him  of  the 
great  joys  there  is  in  walking  with  a  loved 
woman  on  crisp  wind-blown  leaves,  under 
country  trees,  with  tea  soon  to  be  ready  be- 
fore a  big  fire  in  the  house  half-a-mile  away. 
At  that  my  hermit  would  look  at  me  angrily, 
for  a  fleshly  young  man  indeed,  but  I  would 
go  on  to  tell  him  of  how  there  is  no  splendour 
anywhere  like  to  the  splendour  of  a  youth's 
dreams  at  that  quiet  time;  dreams  that  may 
be  of  a  palace  made  of  dead  leaves,  with 
terraced  pleasure  gardens  fashioned  out  of 
autumn  air,  in  which  he  would  walk  with 
his  mistress,  and  be  a  king  and  she  a  queen 
of  more  than  one  world.  .  .  . 

As  though  for  the  first  time,   I  noticed 


94  The  London   Venture 

that  afternoon  a  sheen  of  livid  copper  over 
the  scattered  leaves,  and  I  said  to  myself 
that  it  was  an  undefinable  addition  to  their 
beauty,  like  the  sheen  of  blue  in  the  dark 
hair  of  Shelmerdene,  as  she  sat  in  the  corner 
of  a  sofa  under  a  Liberty-shaded  lamp. 

The  passing  thought  of  Shelmerdene  fixed 
my  attention  through  the  Park  railings  on 
the  prostrate  figures  here  and  there  of  men 
sleeping,  for  it  was  a  very  mild  afternoon 
for  late  October.  Sleep  was  her  foible,  the 
hobby-horse  on  which  she  would  capriciously 
ride  to  heights  of  unreason  whither  no  man 
could  follow  her  and  remain  sane.  She  ad- 
mitted that  she  herself  had,  occasionally,  to 
sleep;  but  she  apologised  for  it,  resented  the 
necessity.  And,  as  I  walked,  I  saw  a  sleep- 
ing, dejected  figure  too  near  the  Park  rail- 
ings as  though  with  her  eyes,  and  was  as 
disgusted.  But  I  smiled  at  the  memory  of 
her  wild  flights  of  mythical  reasoning. 

"The  mistake  Jehovah  made,"  I  heard  her 
saying,  "was  to  teach  Adam  and  Eve  that 
it  was  pleasanter  and  more  comfortable  to 
lie  and  sleep  on  the  same  well-worn  spot  in 
Eden  every  night  than  to  move  about  the 


The  London   Venture  95 

Garden  and  venture  new  resting-places.  It 
was  a  great  mistake,  for  it  gave  sleep  a 
definite  and  important  value,  it  became 
something  to  be  sought  for  in  a  special  and 
comfortable  place.  Sleep  ceased  to  be  a 
careless  lapse,  as  it  had  been  at  first  when 
Adam  ma<dly  chased  the  shadow  of  Lilith 
through  the  twilight.  In  the  company  of 
Eve  sleep  was  no  more  a  state  for  the  tired 
body,  and  only  for  the  body,  but  it  became 
a  thing  of  the  senses;  so  many  hours  definitely 
and  defiantly  flung  as  a  sop  to  Time.  Sleep 
became  part  of  the  business  of  life,  whereas, 
in  those  first  careless  days  of  Adam's  unend- 
ing pursuit  of  Lilith,  it  had  been  only  part 
of  the  hazard  of  life. 

"If  Lilith  had  been  allowed  to  have  the 
handling  of  Adam,"  she  said,  "instead  of 
Eve,  who  was  the  comfortable  sort  of  woman 
'born  to  be  a  mother,'  sleep,  as  we  know 
it,  would  never  have  happened;  unnecessary, 
gluttonous  sleep,  the  mind-sleep! 

"Lilith  was  a  real  woman,  and  very  beau- 
tiful. She  was  the  first  and  greatest  and 
most  mysterious  of  all  courtesans — as,  in- 
deed, the  devil's  mistress  would  have  to  be, 


96  The  London   Venture 

or  lose  her  job.  She  must  have  had  the 
eyes  of  a  Phoenix,  veiled  and  secret,  but 
their  secret  was  only  the  secret  of  love  and 
danger — Danger!  Jehovah  never  had  a 
chance  against  Lucifer,  who  was,  after  all, 
a  man  of  the  world,  in  his  fight  for  the  soul 
of  Lilith.  She  never  had  a  soul,  and  it  was 
of  Lilith  Swinburne  must  have  been  think- 
ing when  he  wrote  'Faustine,'  which  silly 
fools  of  men  have  addressed  to  me.  ...  Of 
course,  she  chose  Lucifer.  Who  wouldn't 
choose  a  dashing  young  rebel,  a  splendid 
failure  if  ever  there  was  one,  with  a  name 
like  Lucifer,  as  compared  to  a  darling,  re- 
spectable, anxious  old  man  called  Jehovah? 
It's  like  asking  a  young  woman  to  choose 
between  Byron  and  Tolstoi  .  .  ." 

But  Shelmerdene  had  long  since  gone,  to 
play  at  life  and  make  fools  of  men;  to  make 
men,  to  break  men,  they  said  of  her,  and 
leave  them  in  the  dust,  grovelling  arabesques 
on  the  carpet  of  their  humiliated  love.  "Let 
them  be,  let  them  be  in  peace,"  I  had  said  to 
her  impatiently,  but  she  had  turned  large, 
inquiring,  serious  eyes  on  me,  and  answered, 
"I  want  to  find  out."    She  had,  indeed,  gone 


The  London   Venture  97 

"to  find  out" — to  Persia,  they  said,  on  a 
splendid,  despairing  chase.  And  I  saw  a 
vision  of  her  there,  but  not  as  the  proud, 
beautiful  creature  who  filled  and  emptied  a 
man's  life  as  though  for  a  caprice;  I  saw 
her  on  her  knees  in  a  ruined  pagan  temple 
on  a  deserted  river  bank,  purified,  and  satis- 
fied, and  tired,  entreating  the  spectre  of  the 
monstrous  goddess,  Ishtar,  to  let  her  cease 
from  the  quest  of  love  ...  I  am  so  tired, 
she  is  saying  to  the  nebulous  goddess  who 
has  fashioned  the  years  of  her  life  into  a 
love-tale.  But  who  is  Shelmerdene  to  beg  a 
favour  from  Ishtar,  who,  in  the  guise  of 
Astarte  in  Syria  and  Astaroth  in  Canaan, 
upset  the  gods  and  households  of  great  peo- 
ples and  debauched  their  minds,  so  that  in 
later  ages  they  were  fit  for  nothing  but  to 
be  conquered  and  to  serve  Rome  and  Byzan- 
tium as  concubines  and  eunuchs'? 

Poor,  weak  Shelmerdene !  Slave  of 
Ishtar !  Didn't  you  know,  when,  as  a  young 
girl,  you  set  yourself,  mischievously  but 
seriously,  "to  find  out"  about  men  and  life, 
that  you  would  never  be  able  to  stop,  that 
you  would  go  on  and  on,  even  from  May- 


98  The  London  Venture 

fair  to  Chorasan6?  You  should  have  known. 
You  have  been  so  wantonly  blind,  Shelmer- 
dene.  You  have  idealised  to-morrow  and 
forgotten  to-day — and  now,  perhaps,  you 
are  on  your  knees  in  a  ruined  temple  in  the 
East,  begging  favours  of  Ishtar.  Not  she 
to  grant  you  a  favour !  Trouble  has  always 
come  to  the  world  from  such  as  she,  a 
malignant  goddess.  It  has  been  said  that 
Semiramis  conquered  the  world,  and  Ishtar 
set  it  on  fire.  .  .  . 


The  London   Venture:   VII 


VII 

I  ASKED  her  once,  but  long  after  I  had 
realised  that  loving  Shelmerdene  could 
not  be  my  one  business  in  life,  if  she  did  not 
feel  that  perhaps — I  was  tentative — she 
would  some  day  be  punished.  "But  how 
young  you  are !"  she  said.  "You  don't  really 
think  I  am  a  sort  of  Zuleika  Dobson,  do 
you? — just  because  one  wretched  man  once 
thought  it  worth  while  to  shoot  himself  be- 
cause of  me,  and  just  because  men  have  that 
peculiar  form  of  Sadism  which  makes  them 
torture  themselves  through  their  love,  when 
they  have  ceased  to  be  loved.  .  .  .  It's  a 
horrible  sight,  my  dear — men  grovelling  in 
their  unreturned  emotions  so  as  to  get  the 
last  twinge  of  pain  out  of  their  humiliation. 
I've  seen  them  grovelling,  and  they  knew 
all  the  time  that  it  would  do  no  good,  merely 
put  them  farther  away  from  me — or  from 

any  woman,  for  the  matter  of  that.     But 

101 


102  The  London  Venture 

they  like   grovelling,   these   six-foot,   stolid 


men." 


"But  haven't  you  ever  been  on  your  knees, 
Shelmerdene'?" 

"Of  course  I  have.  Lots  of  times.  I 
always  begin  like  that — in  fact,  I've  never 
had  an  affair  which  didn't  begin  with  my 
being  down  and  under.  I  am  so  frightfully 
impressionable.  .  .  . 

"You  see,"  she  touched  my  arm,  "I  am 
rather  a  quick  person.  I  mean  I  fall  in  love, 
or  whatever  you  call  my  sort  of  emotion, 
quickly.  While  the  man  is  just  beginning 
to  think  that  I've  got  rather  nice  eyes,  and 
that  I'm  perhaps  more  amusing  than  the 
damfool  women  he's  known  so  far,  I'm  fran- 
tically in  love.  I  do  all  my  grovelling  then. 
And,  Dikran!  if  you  could  only  see  me,  if 
you  could  only  be  invisible  and  see  me  lov- 
ing a  man  more  than  he  loves  me — you 
simply  wouldn't  know  me.  And  I  make  love 
awfully  well,  in  my  quiet  sort  of  way,  much 
better  than  any  man — and  different  love- 
speeches  to  every  different  man,  too!  I  say 
the  divinest  things  to  them — and  quite 
seriously,  thank  God!     The  day  I  can't  fall 


The  London  Venture  103 

in  love  with  a  man  seriously,  and  tell  him 
he's  the  only  man  I've  ever  really  loved,  and 
really  believe  it  when  I'm  saying  it — the  day 
I  can't  do  that  I  shall  know  I'm  an  old,  old 
woman,  too  old  to  live  any  more." 

"Then,  of  course,  you  will  die4?"  I  sug- 
gested. 

"Of  course  I  will  die,"  she  said.  "But  not 
vulgarly — I  mean  I  won't  make  a  point  of 
it,  and  feel  a  fat  coroner's  eyes  on  my  body 
as  my  soul  goes  up  to  Gabriel.  I  shall  die 
in  my  bed,  of  a  broken  heart.  My  heart  will 
break  when  I  begin  to  fade.  I  shall  die 
before  I  have  faded.  .  .  ." 

"No,  you  won't,  Shelmerdene,"  I  said. 
"Many  women  have  sworn  that,  from  Theo- 
dosia  to  La  Pompadour,  but  they  have  not 
died  of  broken  hearts  because  they  never 
realised  when  they  began  to  fade,  and  no 
man  ever  dared  tell  them,  not  even  a  Roi 
Soleil." 

"Oh,  don't  be  pedantic,  Dikran,  and  don't 
worry  me  about  what  other  women  will  or 
won't  do.  You  will  be  quoting  the  'Dolly 
Dialogues'  at  me  next,  and  saying  'Women 
will  be  women  all  the  world  over.' 


104  The  London   Venture 

"It  is  always  like  that  about  me  and  men," 
she  said.  "I  burn  and  burn  and  fizzle  out. 
And  all  the  time  the  man  is  wondering  if 
I  am  playing  with  him  or  not,  if  it  is  worth 
his  while  to  fall  in  love  with  me  or  not — 
poor  pathos,  as  if  he  could  help  it  in  the  end ! 
And  then,  at  last,  when  he  realises  that  he  is 
in  love,  he  begins  to  say  the  things  I  had 
longed  for  him  to  say  four  weeks  before; 
every  Englishman  in  love  is  simply  bound  to 
say,  at  one  time  or  another,  that  he  would 
adore  to  lie  with  his  beloved  in  a  gondola  in 
Venice,  looking  at  the  stars;  any  English- 
man who  doesn't  say  that  when  he  is  in  love 
is  a  suspicious  character,  and  it  will  probably 
turn  out  that  he  talks  French  perfectly. 

"And  when  at  last  he  has  fallen  in  love," 
she  said  dreamily,  "he  wants  me  to  run  away 
with  him,  and  he  is  very  hurt  and  surprised 
when  I  refuse,  and  pathetically  says  some- 
thing 'about  my  having  led  him  to  expect 
that  I  loved  him  to  death,  and  would  do 
anything  for  or  with  him.'  The  poor  little 
man  doesn't  know  that  he  is  behind  the  times, 
that  he  could  have  done  anything  he  liked 


The  London  Venture  105 

with  me  the  first  week  we  met,  when  I  was 
madly  in  love  with  him,  that  when  I  was 
dying  for  him  to  ask  me  to  go  away  with 
him,  and  would  gladly  have  made  a  mess  of 
my  life  at  one  word  from  him — but  four 
weeks  later  I  would  rather  have  died  than 
go  away  with  him. 

"Only  once,"  she  said,  "I  was  almost 
beaten.  I  fell  in  love  with  a  stone  figure. 
Women  are  like  sea-gulls,  they  worship  stone 
figures.  ...  I  went  very  mad,  Dikran.  He 
told  me  that  he  didn't  deserve  being  loved 
by  me — he  admired  me  tremendously,  you 
see — because  he  hadn't  it  in  his  poor  soul  to 
love  any  one.  He  simply  couldn't  love,  he 
said  .  .  .  and  he  felt  such  a  brute.  He  said 
that  often,  poor  boy — he  felt  such  a  brute! 
He  passed  a  hand  over  his  forehead  and, 
with  a  tragic  little  English  gesture,  tried 
to  be  articulate,  to  tell  me  how  intensely  he 
felt  that  he  was  missing  the  best  things  in 
life,  and  yet  couldn't  rectify  it,  because 
.  .  .  'Oh,  my  dear,  I'm  a  hopeless  person!' 
he  said  despairingly,  and  I  forgot  to  pity  my- 
self in  pitying  him. 


106  The  London   Venture 

"But  he  got  cold  again.  He  weighed  his 
words  carefully:  No,  he  liked  me  as  much 
as  he  could  like  any  one,  but  he  didn't  think 
he  loved  me — mark  that  glorious,  arrogant 
think,  Dikran!  .  .  .  He  was  very  ambi- 
tious; with  the  sort  of  confident,  yet  inten- 
sive, nerve-racking  ambition  which  makes 
great  men.  Very  young,  very  wonderful, 
brilliantly  successful  in  his  career  at  an  age 
when  other  men  were  only  beginning  theirs — 
an  iron  man,  with  the  self-destructive  selfish- 
ness of  ice,  which  freezes  the  thing  that 
touches  it,  but  itself  melts  in  the  end.  .  .  . 
He  froze  me.  Don't  think  I'm  exaggerat- 
ing, please,  but,  as  he  spoke — it  was  at  lunch, 
and  a  coon  band  was  playing — I  died  away 
all  to  myself.  I  just  died,  and  then  came  to 
life  again,  coldly,  and  bitterly,  and  despair- 
ingly, but  still  loving  him.  ...  I  couldn't 
not  love  him,  you  see.  His  was  the  sort  of 
beauty  that  was  strong,  and  vital,  and  a  little 
contemptuous,  and  with  an  English  clean- 
ness about  it  that  was  scented.  ...  I  am 
still  loyal  to  my  first  despairing  impression 
of  him.  And  I  knew  that  I  was  really  in 
love  with  him,  because  I  couldn't  bear  the 


The  London   Venture  107 

idea  of  ever  having  loved  any  one  else.  I 
was  sixteen  again,  and  worshipped  a  hero, 
a  man  who  did  things. 

"I  was  a  fool,  of  course — to  believe  him, 
I  mean.  But  when  women  lose  their  heads 
they  lose  the  self-confidence  and  pride  of  a 
lifetime,  too — and,  anyway,  it's  all  rubbish 
about  pride;  there  isn't  any  pride  in  absolute 
love.  There's  a  name  to  be  made  out  of  a 
brilliant  epigram  on  love  and  pride — think 
it  over,  Dikran.  .  .  .  What  an  utter  fool  I 
was  to  believe  him !  As  he  spoke,  over  that 
lunch-table,  I  watched  his  grey  English  eyes, 
which  tried  to  look  straight  into  mine  but 
couldn't,  because  he  was  shy;  he  was  trying 
to  be  frightfully  honest  with  me,  you  see, 
and  being  so  honest  makes  decent  men  shy. 
He  felt  such  a  brute,  but  he  had  to  warn  me 
that  in  any  love  affair  with  him,  he  .  .  . 
yes,  he  did  love  me,  in  his  way,  he  suddenly 
admitted.  But  his  way  wasn't,  couldn't  ever 
be,  mine.  He  simply  couldn't  give  himself 
wholly  to  any  one,  as  I  was  doing.  And  he 
so  frightfully  wanted  to — to  sink  into  my 
love  for  him.  .  .  .  'Shelmerdene,  it's  all  so 
damnable,'  he  said  pathetically,  and  his  sin- 


108  The  London   Venture 

cerity  bit  into  me.  But  I  had  made  up  my 
mind.  I  was  going  to  do  the  last  foolish 
thing  in  a  foolish  life — I'm  a  sentimentalist, 
you  know. 

"I   believed   him.     But    I   clung   to   my 
pathetic  love  affair  with  both  hands,  so  tight 
"— so  tight  that  my  nails  were  white  and  blue 
with  their  pressure  against  his  immobility. 
I  made  up  my  mind  not  to  let  go  of  him, 
however  desperate,  however  hopeless  ...  it 
was  an  attempt  at  life.    He  was  all  I  wanted, 
I  could  face  life  beside  him.     Other  men 
had  been  good  enough  to  play  with,  but  my 
stone  figure — why,  I  had  been  looking  for 
him  all  my  life !     But  in  my  dreams  the 
stone  figure  was  to  come  wonderfully  to  life 
when  I  began  to  worship  it — in  actual  life 
my  worshipping  could  make  the  stone  figure 
do  nothing  more  vital  than  crumble  up  bits 
of  bread  in  a  nervous  effort  to  be  honest  with 
me!     I  took  him  at  that — I  told  you  I  was 
mad,  didn't  \% — I  took  him  at  his  own  value, 
for  as  much  as  I  could  get  out  of  him. 

"I  set  out  to  make  myself  essential  to  him, 
mentally,  physically,  every  way.  ...  If  he 
couldn't  love  me  as  man  to  woman,  then  he 


The  London   Venture  109 

would  have  to  love  me  as  a  tree  trunk  loves 
the  creepers  round  it;  I  was  going  to  cling 
all  round  him,  but  without  his  knowing. 
But  I  hadn't  much  time — just  a  month  or 
perhaps  six  weeks.  He  was  under  orders  for 
Africa,  where  he  was  going  to  take  up  a  big 
administrative  job,  amazing  work  for  so 
young  a  man;  but,  then,  he  was  amazing. 
Just  a  few  weeks  I  had,  then,  to  make  him 
feel  that  he  couldn't  bear  life,  in  Africa  or 
anywhere,  without  me.  And,  my  dear!  life 
didn't  hold  a  more  exquisite  dream  than  that 
which  brought  a  childish  flush  under  my 
rouge,  the  very  dream  of  dreams,  of  how,  a 
few  days  before  he  went,  he  would  take  me 
in  his  arms  and  tell  me  that  he  couldn't  bear 
to  go  alone,  and  that  I  must  follow  him,  and 
together  we  would  face  all  the  scandal  that 
would  come  of  it.  ...  I  passionately 
wanted  the  moment  to  come  when  he  would 
offer  to  risk  his  career  for  me;  I  wanted  him 
to  offer  me  his  ambition,  and  then  I  would 
consider  whether  to  give  it  back  to  him  or 
not.    But  he  didn't.    I  lost. 

"And  I  had  seemed  so  like  winning  dur- 
ing that  six  weeks  between   that   horrible 


110  The  London   Venture 

lunch  and  his  going  away!  London  love 
affairs  are  always  scrappy,  hole-in-the-corner 
things,  but  we  managed  to  live  together  now 
and  again.  And  then,  mon  Dieul  he  sud- 
denly clung  to  me  and  said  he  wasn't  seeing 
enough  of  me,  that  London  was  getting  be- 
tween us,  and  that  we  must  go  away  some- 
where into  the  country  for  at  least  a  week 
before  he  left,  to  breathe  and  to  love.  .  .  . 
Wouldn't  you  have  thought  I  was  winning? 
I  thought  so,  and  my  dreams  were  no  more 
dreams,  but  actual,  glorious  certainties;  he 
would  beg  me  on  his  knees  to  follow  him  to 
Africa ! 

"We  went  away  ten  days  before  he  sailed, 
to  a  delightful  little  inn  a  few  miles  from 
Llangollen.  Seven  days  we  spent  there. 
Wonderful,  intimate  days  round  about  that 
little  inn  by  the  Welsh  stream;  we  were 
children  playing  under  a  wilderness  of  blue 
sky,  more  blue  than  Italy's  because  of  the 
white  and  grey  puffs  of  clouds  which  make 
an  English  sky  more  human  than  any  other; 
and  we  played  with  those  toy  hills  which  are 
called  mountains  in  Wales,  and  we  were 
often  silent  because  there  was  too  much  to 


The  London   Venture  111 

talk  about.  .  .  .  And  as  we  sat  silently  fac- 
ing each  other  in  the  train  back  to  London, 
I  knew  I  had  won.  There  were  three  days 
left. 

"In  London,  he  dropped  me  here  at  my 
house,  and  went  on  to  his  flat;  he  was  to 
come  in  the  evening  to  fetch  me  out  to 
dinner.  But  he  was  back  within  an  hour.  I 
had  to  receive  him  in  a  kimono.  I  found  him 
pacing  up  and  down  this  room,  at  the  far  end 
there,  by  the  windows.  He  came  quickly  to 
me,  and  told  me  that  his  orders  had  been 
changed — he  had  to  go  to  Paris  first,  spend 
two  days  there,  and  then  to  Africa  via  Mar- 
seilles. 'To  Paris'?'  I  said,  not  understand- 
ing. 'Yes,  to-night — in  two  hours,'  he  said, 
quickly,  shyly.  He  was  embarrassed  at  the 
idea  of  a  possible  scene.  But  he  was  cold. 
He  must  go  at  once,  he  said.  And  he  looked 
eager  to  go,  to  go  and  be  doing.  He  shook 
both  my  hands — I  hadn't  a  word — and  al- 
most forgot  to  kiss  me.  It  was  just  as  though 
nothing  had  ever  happened  between  us,  as 
though  we  hadn't  ever  been  to  Wales,  or 
played,  and  laughed,  and  loved;  as  though 
he  had  never  begged  me  to  run  my  fingers 


112  The  London  Venture 

through  his  hair,  because  I  had  said  his  hair 
was  a  garden  where  gold  and  green  flowers 
grew.  He  was  going  away;  and  he  was  just 
as  when  I  had  first  met  him,  or  at  that  lunch 
— I  hadn't  gained  anything  at  all,  it  was  all 
just  a  funny,  tragic,  silly  dream  ...  he  had 
come  and  now  he  was  going  away.  He 
would  write  to  me,  he  said,  and  he  would  be 
back  in  sixteen  months.   .  .  . 

"I'm  not  a  bad  loser,  you  know;  I  can 
say  such  and  such  a  thing  isn't  for  me,  and 
then  try  and  undermine  my  wretchedness 
with  philosophy.  But  I  simply  didn't  exist 
for  a  few  months;  I  just  went  into  my  little 
shell  and  stayed  there,  and  was  miserable 
all  to  myself,  and  not  bitter  at  all,  because 
I  sort  of  understood  him,  and  knew  he  had 
been  true  to  himself.  It  was  I  who  had 
failed  in  trying  to  make  him  false  to  his  own 
nature.  .  .  .  But  there's  a  limit  to  all 
things;  there  comes  a  time  when  one  can't 
bear  any  more  gloom,  and.  then  there  is  a 
reaction.  No  one  with  any  courage  can  be 
wretched  for  ever — anyway,  I  can't.  So, 
suddenly,  after  a  few  months,  I  went  out 
into  the  world  again,  and  played  and  jumped 


The  London   Venture  113 

about,  and  made  my  body  so  tired  that  my 
mind  hadn't  a  chance  to  think. 

"His  first  few  letters  were  cold,  honest 
things,  a  little  pompous  in  their  appreciations 
of  me  tacked  on  to  literary  descriptions  of 
the  Nile,  and  the  desert,  and  the  natives.  I 
wrote  to  him  only  once,  a  wonderful  letter, 
but  I  hadn't  the  energy  to  write  again — 
what  was  the  good4? 

"At  the  end  of  a  year  I  was  really  in  the 
whirl  of  the  great  world  again.  There  were 
a  few  kicks  left  in  Shelmerdene  yet,  I  told 
myself  hardly,  and  Maurice  became  just  a 
tender  memory.  I  never  thought  of  how 
he  would  come  back  to  England  soon,  as 
he  had  said,  and  what  we  would  do  then, 
for  I  had  so  dinned  it  into  myself  that  he 
wasn't  for  me  that  I  had  entirely  given  up 
the  quest  of  the  Blue  Bird.  He  was  just  a 
tender  memory  .  .  .  and  impressionable  me 
fell  in  love  again.  But  not  as  with  Maurice 
— I  was  top-dog  this  time.  He  was  the  sort 
of  man  that  didn't  count  except  in  that  I 
loved  him.  He  was  the  servant  of  my  re- 
action against  Maurice,  and  to  serve  me  well 
he  had  to  help  me  wipe  out  all  the  castles 


114  The  London   Venture 

of  sentiment  I  had  built  around  Maurice. 
And  the  most  gorgeous  castle  of  all  I  had 
built  round  that  little  Welsh  inn!  Some- 
thing must  be  done  about  that,  I  told  my- 
self, but  for  a  long  time  I  was  afraid  of  the 
ghost  of  Maurice,  which  might  still  haunt 
the  place,  and  bring  him  back  overpower- 
ingly  to  me.  It  was  a  risk;  by  going  there 
with  some  one  else  I  might  either  succeed 
in  demolishing  Maurice's  last  castle,  or  I 
might  tragically  have  to  rebuild  all  the 
others,  and  worship  him  again. 

"He  had  continued  to  write  to  me,  com- 
plaining of  my  silence.  And  he  had  some- 
how become  insistent — he  missed  me,  it 
seemed.  He  didn't  write  that  he  loved  me, 
but  he  forgot  to  describe  the  Nile,  and  wrote 
about  love  as  though  it  were  a  real  and  beau- 
tiful thing  and  not  a  pastime  to  be  wedged 
in  between  fishing  and  hunting.  I  wrote  to 
him  once  again,  rather  lightly,  saying  that  I 
had  patched  up  my  heart  and  might  never 
give  him  a  chance  to  break  it  again.  That 
was  just  before  I  went  to  demolish  the  last 
castle  of  my  love  for  him.  For  I  did  go; 
one  day  my  young  man  produced  a  high- 


The  London  Venture  115 

powered  car  which  could  go  fast  enough  to 
prevent  one  sleeping  from  boredom,  and  I 
said  'Us  for  Llangollen,'  and  away  we 
went  .  .  . 

"The  divinest  thing  about  that  little  inn 
was  its  miniature  dining-room,  composed  al- 
most entirely  of  a  large  bow-window  and  a 
long  Queen  Anne  refectory  table.  There 
were  three  tables,  of  which  never  more 
than  one  was  occupied.  Maurice  and  I  had 
sat  at  the  table  by  the  window,  and  now  my 
reaction  and  I  sat  there  again ;  we  looked  out 
on  to  a  toy  garden  sloping  down  to  a  brown 
stream  which  made  much  more  noise  than 
you  could  think  possible  for  so  narrow  a 
thing.  My  back  was  to  the  door,  and  I  sat 
facing  a  large  mirror,  with  the  garden  and 
the  stream  on  my  right;  he  sat  facing  the 
window,  adoring  me,  the  adventure,  the 
stream,  and  the  food.  And  I  was  happy  too, 
for  now  I  realised  that  I  had  fallen  out  of 
love  with  Maurice,  for  his  ghost  didn't  haunt 
the  chair  beside  me,  and  I  could  think  of 
him  tenderly,  without  regret.  I  was  happy 
— until,  in  the  mirror  in  front  of  me,  I  saw 
the  great  figure  of  Maurice,  and  his  face,  at 


116  The  London  Venture 

the  open  door.  Our  eyes  met  in  the  mirror, 
the  eyes  of  statues,  waiting.  ...  I  don't 
know  what  I  felt — I  wasn't  afraid,  I  know. 
Perhaps  I  wasn't  even  ashamed.  I  don't 
know  how  long  he  stood  there,  filling  the 
doorway.  Not  more  than  a  few  seconds,  but 
all  the  intimacy  of  six  weeks  met  in  our 
glance  in  that  mirror.  At  last  he  took  his 
eyes  off  mine  and  looked  at  the  man  beside 
me,  who  hadn't  seen  him.  I  thought  his  lips 
twitched,  and  his  eyes  became  adorably 
stern,  and  then  the  mirror  clouded  over.  .  .  . 
When  I  could  see  again  the  door  was  closed, 
and  Maurice  was  gone.  The  magic  mirror 
was  empty  of  all  but  my  unbelieving  eyes, 
and  the  profile  of  the  man  beside  me,  who 
hadn't  seen  him  and  never  knew  that  I  had 
lived  six  weeks  while  he  ate  a  potato.  .  .  . 

"I  stayed  my  week  out  in  Wales,  because 
I  always  try  to  do  what  is  expected  of  me. 
When  I  got  home,  right  on  the  top  of  a  pile 
of  letters — I  had  given  orders  for  nothing, 
not  even  wires,  to  be  sent  on  to  me — was  a 
wire,  which  had  arrived  one  hour  after  I  had 
left  for  Wales.  It  was  from  Southampton, 
and  it  said :  'Just  arrived.    Am  going  straight 


The  London  Venture  117 

up  to  the  little  palace  in  Wales  because  of 
memories.  Will  arrive  there  dinner-time. 
Shall  we  dine  together  by  the  window1?' 

"And  so,  you  see,  I  had  won  and  lost  and 
won  again,  but  how  pathetically.  .  .  .  Am 
I  such  a  bad  woman,  d'you  think?" 


The  London  Venture:   VIII 


VIII 

AS  I  look  back  now  on  the  past  years,  I 
find  that  the  thing  that  penetrated 
most  into  my  inner  self,  shocked  me  to  the 
heart,  and  gave  me  no  room  and  left  no  de- 
sire for  any  pretence  about  the  will  of  fate 
and  destiny,  such  as  sometimes  consoles  grief, 
was  the  death  of  my  friend  Louis.  Unlike 
most  great  friendships,  mine  with  Louis  be- 
gan at  school;  and  those,  to  whom  circum- 
stances have  not  allowed  friendships  at 
school,  cannot  realise  the  intensity  of  certain 
few  friendships  which,  beginning  on  a  basis 
of  tomfoolery  and  ragging,  as  the  general 
relations  between  schoolboys  begin,  yet  sur- 
vive them  all,  and  steadily  ripen  with  the 
years  into  a  maturity  of  companionship, 
which  has  such  a  quality  and  nobility  of  its 
own  that  no  other  relation,  not  even  that  of 
passionate  love,  can  ever  take  its  place  when 
it  is  gone. 

I  have  not  happened  to  mention  Louis  be- 
fore in  these  papers  for  the  reason  that  he 

121 


122  The  London   Venture 

had  actually  come  very  little  into  my  life  in 
London.  In  fact,  we  retained  our  intimacy 
against  the  aggression  of  our  different  lives, 
which  was  rather  paradoxical  for  the  casual 
people  we  believed  ourselves  to  be.  (With- 
out a  sincere  belief  in  his  own  casualness  the 
modern  youth  would  be  the  most  self- 
important  ass  of  all  generations.)  Our 
ways  of  life  lead  very  contrarily;  there  was 
nowhere  they  could  rationally  touch;  he,  a 
soldier;  I,  a  doctor,  lawyer,  or  pedlar,  I  did 
not  know  which.  But  I  had  the  grace,  or  if 
you  like,  the  foolishness,  to  envy  him  the 
definite  markings  of  his  career;  I  envied  him 
his  knowledge  of  the  road  he  wished  to  tread, 
and  of  the  almost  certainties  which  lay  in- 
evitably along  that  road. 

Later,  in  those  very  best  of  days,  I  used 
to  talk  about  him  to  Shelmerdene.  And  as 
I  described,  she  listened  and  wondered.  For, 
she  said,  such  a  man  as  I  described  Louis  to 
be,  and  myself,  could  have  nothing  in  com- 
mon. But  I  told  her  that  it  isn't  necessary 
for  two  people  to  have  anything  "in  com- 
mon" but  friendship — and  as  I  made  that 
meaningless  remark  I  put  on  a  superior  air, 


The  London   Venture  123 

and  she  did  not  laugh  at  me.  She  continued 
to  wonder  during  months,  and  at  last  she 
said,  "Produce  this  wretched  youth."  But 
I  would  not  produce  him,  "because  Louis  has 
never  in  his  life  met  or  dreamt  of  any  one 
like  you,  and  he  will  fall  in  love  with  you 
straight  away.  And  as  he  is  more  honest 
than  I  am,  so  he  will  fall  in  love  with  you 
much  more  seriously,  and  that  will  be  very 
bad  for  him,  because  you  are  the  sort  of 
woman  that  you  are.  It  isn't  fair  to  destroy 
the  illusions  of  a  helpless  subaltern  in  the 
Rifle  Brigade.  .  .  .  No,  I  will  not  produce 
him,  Shelmerdene."  But  of  course  I  did, 
and  of  course  Louis  saw,  heard,  and  suc- 
cumbed delightedly,  and  all  through  that 
lunch  and  for  the  half-hour  after  I  had  to 
keep  a  very  stern  eye  on  Shelmerdene  and 
take  great  care  not  to  let  her  get  within  a 
yard  of  him,  else  she  would  have  asked  him 
to  go  and  see  her  next  time  he  was  in  town, 
and  then  there  would  have  been  another 
wild-eyed  ghost  wandering  about  the  desert 
places  of  Mayfair.  As  for  Louis,  he  beat 
even  his  own  record  for  dulness  during  that 
lunch.     He  admired  her  tremendously  and 


124  The  London   Venture 

obviously,  and  too  obviously  he  couldn't 
understand  a  beautiful  woman  with  beauty 
enough  to  be  as  dull  as  she  liked,  saying 
witty  and  amusing  things  every  few  seconds, 
always  giving  the  most  trivial  remark,  the 
most  stereotyped  phrase,  such  a  queer  twist 
as  would  make  it  seem  delightfully  new. 
For  ever  after  he  pestered  me  to  "produce" 
him  again,  and  I  made  myself  rather  un- 
popular by  putting  him  off;  and  I  never  did 
let  him  see  her  again.  On  Shelmerdene's 
part  it  was  just  cussedness  to  worry  me  to 
see  him  again,  for  with  a  disgusted  laugh  at 
my  "heavy  father  stunt,"  she  forgot  all  about 
him;  after  that  lunch  she  had  found  him 
"rather  dull  and  a  dear,  and  much  to  be 
loved  by  all  women  over  thirty-five.  I  am 
not  yet  old  enough  to  love  your  Louis,"  she 
said.  And  she  retained  her  surprise  at  our 
friendship. 

It  was,  perhaps,  rather  surprising;  sur- 
prising not  so  much  that  we  were  friends, 
but  how  we  ever  became  friends;  for  there 
are  many  people  in  this  world,  who  could  be 
great  friends  with  each  other  if  they  could 
but  once  surmount  the  first  barrier,  if  they 


The  London   Venture  125 

could  but  wish  to  surmount  that  barrier — 
and  between  Louis  and  me  there  was  much 
more  than  a  simple  barrier  to  surmount. 
We  became  friends  in  spite  of  ourselves, 
then;  though  Louis,  as  you  may  believe,  had 
nothing  at  all  to  do  with  the  affair;  he  just 
sat  tight  and  let  things  happen,  to  him,  for 
his  was  not  the  nature  consciously  to  defeat 
an  invisible  aim,  a  tyrannical  decree.  As 
one  of  England's  governing  classes,  even  at 
the  age  of  fourteen  when  I  first  met  him,  such 
a  rebellion  as  that  of  forcing  God's  hand 
about  the  smallest  trifle  would  somehow 
have  savoured  to  him  of  disloyalty  to  the 
"Morning  Post"  which,  together  with  the 
Navy,  Louis  took  as  representing  the  British 
Empire. 

I  had  been  at  school  already  one  term 
when  Louis  came;  and  so  it  was  at  break- 
fast on  the  opening  day  of  the  winter  term 
that  I  first  noticed  his  bewildered  face, 
though  as  we  grew  to  prefects  that  same 
face  aired  so  absolute  a  nonchalance  that, 
together  with  my  rather  sophisticated  fea- 
tures, we  thoroughly  deserved  the  title  of 
the  blasted  roues.     However,  at  that  time, 


126  The  London   Venture 

we  were  not  prefects,  but  "new  bugs,"  though 
Louis  was  by  one  term  a  newer  "bug"  than 
myself  and  my  friends,  and  therefore  had  to 
sit  at  the  bottom  of  the  "bug"  table  and  take 
his  food  as  he  found  it.  I,  of  course,  took  no 
notice  of  him  at  all;  I  maintained  a,  so  to 
speak,  official  hauteur  about  our  meal-time 
relations — one  couldn't  do  anything  else, 
you  know,  if  one  wished  to  keep  unimpaired 
the  dignity  of  one's  seniority.  I  had,  in  fact, 
no  use  for  newer  "bugs"  than  myself;  I  was 
quite  happy  at  my  own  end  of  the  table  with 
the  three  men  (ages  fourteen  to  fourteen-and- 
a-half)  with  whom  I  shared  a  study.  We 
made  a  good  and  gay  study,  I  remember,  for 
they  were  three  stalwart  fellows  and  I,  even 
at  that  age  not  taking  my  Armenianism  very 
seriously,  gave  a  quite  passable  imitation  of 
an  English  public-school  man. 

How,  as  I  looked  round  at  my  three  friends 
and  said  to  myself  "here  are  companions  for 
life,"  how  was  I  to  know  of  the  irruption 
into  my  life  of  a  bewildered  face!  I 
despised  that  face.  It  was  the  face  of  a 
newer  "bug"  than  myself.  But  the  wretched 
man  could  play  soccer,  I  noticed;  his  deft 


The  London   Venture  127 

work  at  "inside  right"  to  my  "center  for- 
ward" warmed  my  heart;  and,  by  the  time 
the  term  was  half  over,  he  had  gained  a 
certain  distinction  for  being  consistently  at 
the  bottom  of  the  lowest  form  in  the  school ; 
one  rather  liked  a  man  for  sticking  to  his 
convictions  like  that. 

Nevertheless  we  became  silently  inimical. 
He  ceased  to  look  bewildered;  with  an  Eng- 
lish cunning  he  had  already  found  that  an 
air  of  nonchalance  pays  best.  And  his  sort 
of  "Oh,  d'you  think  so*?"  air  began  to  irritate 
me;  it  was  no  good  doing  my  man  of  the 
world  on  a  man  who  obviously  made  a  point 
of  not  believing  what  I  said.  I  rather  felt 
in  speaking  to  him  as  an  irritated  and  fussy 
foreign  ambassador  must  feel  before  the 
well-bred  imperturbability  of  Mr.  Balfour; 
I  wasn't  then  old  enough  to  know  I  felt  like 
that,  but  myself  and  study  had  reasonable 
grounds  for  deciding  that  "that  sloppy- 
haired  new  long  bug  was  a  conceited  young 
swine,"  and  that  he  was  trading  rather  too 
much  on  being  at  the  bottom  of  the  school. 

There  was  a  dark-haired,  sallow-faced 
youth,  one  Marsden,  who  had  come  the  same 


128  The  London   Venture 

term  as  we  three;  he  had  at  first  shared  our 
study,  but  had  been  fired  out  for  being  a 
cub.     And,    by    intimating    to    the    House- 
Master  that  if  he  was  put  back  in  our  study, 
new  bugs  or  no,  we  wouldn't  answer  for  his 
mother's  knowing  him,  we  had  fired  him  out 
in  such  a  way  that  he  couldn't  ever  get  back. 
But  he  didn't  try  to  get  back.    He  just  went 
into  the  newest  bug's  study,  and  there,  when 
Louis  came  the  next  term,  made  firm  and 
fast  friends  with  him.    Marsden  disliked  me 
much  more  than  he  disliked  any  one  else,  as 
I  had  been  the  instigator  of  his  ejection  from 
our  study,  and  so  the  silent  and  contemp- 
tuous  enmity   with   which   Louis   eyed   me 
wasn't  very  strange.     Those  two  made  com- 
mon cause  in  their  indifference  to  anything 
we  three  at  the  head  of  the  table  might  say; 
and  soon,  things  came  to  such  a  pass  that 
we  had  to  put  lumps  of  salt  into  the  potato 
dish  before  handing  it  down  to  them.     And 
even  that  didn't  seem  to  have  much  effect, 
for  one  tea-time  I  distinctly  heard  a  murmur 
resembling    "Armenian   Jew"    escape    from 
Marsden's  lips;  that,  of  course,  couldn't  be 
borne,  and  I  couldn't  then  explain  to  him 


The  London   Venture  129 

that  there  was  no  such  person  as  an  Armenian 
Jew  for  I  wasn't  myself  quite  certain  about 
it — all  I  knew  was  that  I  wasn't  a  Jew,  and 
it  wasn't  Marsden  who  was  going  to  call  me 
one  in  vain.  So  there  and  then  I  upped  and 
threw  my  pot  of  jam  at  his  head,  striking 
him  neatly  just  above  the  right  eye;  I  didn't 
do  it  in  anger,  I  didn't  know  why  I  did  it, 
though  now  I  know  it  was  done  through  a 
base  passion  for  notoriety,  which  I  still  have, 
though  in  a  less  primitive  manner.  I  cer- 
tainly got  notoriety  then,  and  also  six  cuts 
from  a  very  supple  cane  and  a  Georgic  on 
which  to  work  off  my  ardour. 

But  I  gained  Louis  for  a  friend.  He  had, 
it  seemed,  admired  the  deft  and  unassuming 
way  in  which  I  had  thrown  that  pot  of  jam — 
he  knew  even  less  than  I  did  about  that  pas- 
sion for  notoriety — and  when  he  met  me  in 
the  passage  as  I  came  back  from  my  six  cuts 
in  the  prefects'  room,  he  said,  "I  say,  bad 
luck,"  and  I  suggested  that  if  his  friend 
Marsden' s  ugly  face  hadn't  got  in  the  way 
of  a  perfectly  harmless  pot  of  jam  I  wouldn't 
have  got  a  licking.  Thus,  in  a  three-minute 
talk,  we  became  friends;  but  when  we  each 


130  The  London   Venture 

went  to  our  own  studies  we  didn't  know  we 
were  friends — in  fact,  I  was  quite  prepared 
to  go  on  treating  him  as  an  enemy  until, 
when  we  met  again,  we  both  seemed  to  find 
that  we  had  something  to  say  to  each  other. 
And  throughout  those  years  of  school  we  had 
always  something  to  say  to  each  other  which 
we  couldn't  say  quite  in  the  same  way  to  any 
one  else,  and  that  seems  to  me  to  be  the 
basis  of  all  friendship.  ...  I  don't  quite 
know  what  happened  to  Marsden,  or  how 
Louis  told  him  that  he  had  decided  to  dis- 
continue his  friendship.  I  have  an  idea  that 
Marsden  went  on  disliking  me  through  four 
years  of  school,  and  that  if  I  met  him  on 
Piccadilly  to-morrow  would  recognise  me 
only  to  scowl  at  me,  the  man  who  not  only 
hit  him  over  the  eye  with  a  pot  of  jam,  but 
also  deprived  him  of  his  best  friend. 

Louis  and  I  left  school  together;  he  on 
his  inevitable  road  to  Sandhurst,  and  I,  with 
a  puckered  side  glance  at  Oxford,  to  Edin- 
burgh University.  Even  now  I  don't  know 
why  I  went  to  Edinburgh  and  not  to  Oxford ; 
I  had  always  intended  going  to  Oxford,  my 
family  had  always  intended  that  I  should  go 


The  London   Venture  131 

to  Oxford,  up  to  the  last  -moment  I  was 
actually  going  to  Oxford — when,  suddenly, 
with  a  bowler  hat  crammed  over  my  left  ear 
and  a  look  of  vicious  obstinacy,  I  decided 
that  I  would  go  to  Edinburgh  instead. 

Of  course  it  was  a  silly  mistake.  The  only 
thing  I  have  gained  by  not  going  to  Oxford 
is  an  utter  inability  to  write  poetry  and  a 
sort  of  superior  contempt  for  all  pale,  inter- 
esting-looking young  men  with  dark  eyes  and 
spiritual  hair  who  are  tremendously  con- 
cerned about  the  utter  worthlessness  of  Mr. 
William  Watson's  poetry.  Of  course  my 
own  superior  attitude  may  be  just  as  unbear- 
able as  their  anaemic  enthusiasm  over,  say,  a 
newly  discovered  rondel  by  the  youngest  son 
of  the  local  fishmonger;  but  I  at  least  do 
sincerely  try  to  face  and  appreciate  litera- 
ture boldly,  and  frankly,  and  normally,  and 
not  self-consciously  as  they  do,  attacking 
literature  from  anywhere  but  a  sane  stand- 
point, trying  to  force  a  breach  in  any  queer 
spot  so  that  it  is  unusual  and  has  not  been 
thought  of  before;  and  through  this  original 
breach  will  suddenly  appear  an  Oxford  face 
with  a  queer  unhallowed  grin  of  self-con- 


132  The  London   Venture 

scious  cleverness ;  and  all  this  for  a  thin  book 
of  poems  in  a  yellow  cover,  called,  as  like 
as  not,  "Golden  Oxygen"  ! 

Louis,  down  at  Sandhurst,  was  being  made 
into  a  soldier,  and  I,  up  at  Edinburgh,  was 
on  the  high  road  to  general  fecklessness.  I 
only  stayed  there  a  few  months;  jumbled 
months  of  elementary  medicine,  political 
economy,  metaphysics,  theosophy — I  once 
handed  round  programs  at  an  Annie  Besant 
lecture  at  the  Usher  Hall — and  beer,  lots 
of  beer.  And  then,  one  night,  I  emptied  my 
last  mug,  and  with  another  side-glance  at 
Oxford,  came  down  to  London;  "to  take  up 
a  literary  career"  my  biographer  will  no 
doubt  write  of  me.  I  may  of  course  have 
had  a  "literary  career"  at  the  back  of  my 
mind,  but  as  it  was  I  slacked  outrageously, 
much  to  Louis'  disgust  and  envy.  I  have 
already  written  of  those  months,  how  I 
walked  in  the  Green  Park,  and  sat  in  pic- 
ture galleries,  and  was  lonely. 

That  first  loneliness  was  lightened  only 
by  the  occasional  visits  to  London  of  Louis. 
He  was  by  now  a  subaltern  in  the  Rifle 
Brigade,    with    an    indefinite    but    cultured 


The  London   Venture  133 

growth  somewhere  between  his  nose  and 
upper  lip,  and  a  negligent  way  of  wearing 
mufti,  as  though  to  say,  "God,  it's  good  to 
be  back  in  civilised  things  again!"  They 
were  jolly,  sudden  evenings,  those!  Lon- 
don was  still  careless  then.  Of  an  evening, 
a  couple  of  young  men  in  dress  suits  with  top 
hats  balanced  over  their  eyebrows  and  eyes 
full  of  a  blase  vacancy,  were  not  as  remark- 
able as  they  now  are.  Life  has  lost  its 
whilom  courtesy  to  a  top  hat.  Red  flags 
and  top  hats  cannot  exist  side  by  side;  the 
world  is  not  big  enough  for  both.  Ah,  thou 
Bolshevik,  thou  class-beridden  shop-steward ! 
When  ye  die,  how  can  ye  say  that  ye  have 
ever  lived  if,  in  your  aggressive  experiences, 
you  have  not  known  upon  your  foreheads  the 
elegant  weight  of  a  top  hat,  made  especially 
to  suit  your  Marxian  craniums  by  one  Locke, 
who  has  an  ancient  shop  at  the  lower  end 
of  St.  James's  Street  and  did  at  one  time 
dictate  the  headwear  of  the  beaux  of  White's 
and  Crockford's.  I  warrant  the  life  of  my 
top  hat,  made  by  that  same  artist  to  with- 
stand the  impact  of  the  fattest  woman  on 
earth,  against  all  the  battering  eloquence  of 


134  The  London  Venture 

all  the  orators  in  all  the  Albert  Halls  of  all 
the  Red  Flag  countries.  With  it  on  my  head 
I  will  finesse  any  argument  whatsoever  with 
you  any  night  of  the  week.  And  at  the  end 
of  the  argument,  if  you  are  still  obstinate,  I 
will  cram  my  blessed  top  hat  on  your  head 
and,  lo  and  behold !  you  are  at  once  a  Labour 
Minister  in  the  Cabinet,  and  a  most  respect- 
able man  with  a  most  rectangular  house  in 
Portman  Square!  .  .  .  But  I  must  go  back 
to  Louis,  who  never  got  further  in  his  study 
of  Labour  than  an  idea  that  all  station-mas- 
ters were  labour  leaders  because  they  took 
tips  so  impressively. 

Those  occasional  evenings  were  very  good. 
I  put  away  from  myself  writing  and  books — 
Louis  hadn't  really  ever  read  anything  but 
Kipling,  "Ole-Luk-Oie"  and  "The  Riddle  of 
the  Sands" — and  I  temporarily  forgot  Shel- 
merdene,  and  we  dined  right  royally.  I  don't 
know  what  we  talked  about,  perhaps  we 
talked  of  nothing  at  all;  but  we  talked  all 
the  time,  and  we  laughed  a  great  deal,  and 
we  still  had  the  good  old  "blasted  roue" 
touch  about  us.  We  were  very,  very  old 
indeed,  so  old  that  we  decided  that  the  first 


The  London  Venture  135 

act  of  no  play  or  revue  in  the  world  could 
compensate  one  for  a  hurried  dinner;  and 
we  were  old  enough  to  know  that  a  confiden- 
tial manner  to  maitres  d' hotels  is  a  thing  to 
be  cultivated,  else  a  chicken  is  apt  to  be 
wizened  and  the  sweet  an  unconscionable 
long  time  in  coming.  After  dinner,  a  show, 
and  then  perhaps  a  night  club,  "to  teach 
those  gals  how  to  dance." 

We  founded  a  Club  for  Good  Mannered 
People.  I,  as  the  founder,  was  the  president 
of  the  club,  and  Louis  the  vice-president; 
there  were  no  members  because  we  unani- 
mously black-balled  every  one  whom,  in  a 
moment  of  weakness,  one  or  other  of  us 
might  propose.  We  decided,  in  the  end,  that 
the  Club  could  never  have  any  members  ex- 
cept the  president  and  vice-president,  simply 
because  the  men  of  our  own  generation  were 
the  worst  mannered  crew  God  ever  put  within 
lounging  distance  of  a  drawing-room.  .  .  . 
There  must  be  something  wrong,  we  said,  in 
a  world  where  public-school  men  could  be 
recognised  by  the  muddy  footprints  they 
left  on  other  people's  carpets.  So  it  was 
obviously  left  to  us  to  supply  the  deficiency 


136  The  London   Venture 

of  our  generation,  both  as  regards  manners 
and  everything  else.  We  made  a  cult  of 
good  manners;  Louis  took  to  them  as  a  cult 
where  he  had  never  taken  to  them  as  a  neces- 
sity, and  the  happiest  moments  of  his  life 
were  when  he  could  work  it  off  on  to  some 
helpless  woman  who  had  dropped  an  um- 
brella or  a  handkerchief.  The  Club,  we 
decided,  must  never  come  to  an  end,  it  must 
go  on  being  a  Club  until  one  or  other  of  us 
should  die  .  .  .  and  now  the  Club  is  no 
more,  for  suddenly  a  spring  gave  way,  the 
world  gave  a  lurch  towards  hell,  and  Louis 
stopped  playing  at  soldiers  to  go  away  and 
be  a  real  soldier,  to  die  in  his  first  attack  with 
a  bullet  in  his  chest.  .  .  . 


The  London   Venture:   IX 


s 


IX 

OMEWHERE  in  these  papers  I  have 
said  that  Shelmerdene  left  England,  but 
I  touched  on  it  very  lightly,  for  I  am  only 
half-heartedly  a  realist,  and  may  yet  live  to 
be  accused  of  shuffling  humanity  behind  a 
phrase.  .  .  .  Youth  must  endure  its  periods 
of  loneliness  with  what  grace  it  can;  and 
youth  could  endure  them  as  resignedly  as  its 
preceptors,  if  it  were  not  for  its  grotesque 
self-importance,  which  inflates  loneliness  to 
such  a  size  that  it  envelopes  a  young  man's 
whole  being,  leaving  him  at  the  end  a  sorry 
wreck  of  what  was  once  a  happy  mortal. 
Anyway,  that  is  what  happened  to  me;  I 
took  the  whole  affair  in  the  worst  possible 
spirit,  and,  during  that  probation  time  to 
wisdom,  thought  and  wrote  and  did  so  many 
silly  things,  smashed  ideals  and  cursed  idols 
with  such  morbid  thoroughness  and  convic- 
tion (after  the  fashion  of  all  the  bitterest 

young  men),  that  I  must  have  been  as  detest- 

139 


140  The  London   Venture 

able  a  person  as  ever  trickled  wheezily  from 
the,  well,  pessimistic  pen  of  a  Mr.  Wyndham 
Lewis.  .  .  .  But  it  takes  very  little  effort 
to  forget  that  time  entirely,  to  let  it  bury 
itself  with  what  mourning  it  can  muster  from 
the  Shades  which  sent  it  to  plague  me. 
Enough  that  it  passed,  but  not  before  it  had, 
as  they  say,  "put  me  wise"  about  the  world 
and  its  ways. 

For  Shelmerdene  had  left  behind  her  much 
more  than  just  loneliness;  much  that  was 
more  precious  and,  thankfully,  more  lasting; 
for  she  had  found  a  young  man  shaped 
entirely  of  acute  angles  and  sharp  corners, 
and  had  rubbed  and  polished  them  over  with 
such  delicate  tact  that  it  was  only  months, 
after  she  had  .gone  that  I  suddenly  realised 
how  much  more  fit  I  was  to  cope  with  a  com- 
plicated world  since  I  had  known  her.  But, 
more  importantly,  Shelmerdene  to  me  was 
England.  Before  I  met  her  I  did  not  know 
England ;  I  knew  English,  but  England  only 
as  a  man  knows  the  landmarks  about  him 
in  a  strange  country.  But  when  she  had 
come  and  gone  England  was  a  discovered 
country,   a  vast  and  ever-increasing  pano- 


The  London   Venture  141 

Tama  in  which  discoveries  were  continually 
made,  leaving  yet  more  hidden  valleys  of 
discoveries  still  to  be  made — and  to  be  en- 
joyed! So  much  and  much  more,  O  un- 
believer, I  learnt  from  Shelmerdene,  and  in 
the  learning  of  it  lay  the  best  and  gladdest 
lesson  of  all. 

Time,  they  say,  can  efface  all  things,  but 
in  truth  it  can  efface  nothing  but  its  own 
inability  to  smooth  out  the  real  problems  of 
life;  so  at  least  I  have  found  in  the  one  in- 
stance in  which  I  have  challenged  time  to 
do  its  best  for  me,  a  slave  bound  down  by  an 
unholy  wizardry;  or  else,  perhaps,  it  was 
that  Shelmerdene  was  not  made  of  the  stuff 
which  fades  into  the  years  and  becomes 
musty  and  haggard  in  their  increasing  com- 
pany. I  do  not  know.  But,  take  it  as  I  will, 
all  the  service  time  has  been  able  to  do  for  me 
has  been  negative,  for  without  disarranging 
one  hair  of  her  head  it  has  only  emphasised 
in  me  the  profound  and  subtle  influence  of 
that  gracefully  licentious  woman  whom  I 
once  called  Shelmerdene,  because,  I  told  her, 
"it  is  the  name  of  an  American  girl  which  I 
found  in  a  very  bad  American  novel  about 


142  The  London   Venture 

the  fanatical  Puritans  of  New  England,  and 
the  name  seems  to  suit  you  because  in  New 
England  they  would  have  treated  you  ex- 
actly as  they  treated  Shelmerdene  Gray,  the 
heroine  of  this  book,  whom  they  branded 
and  burnt  as  a  shameless  woman,  but  loved 
in  their  withered  hearts  for  her  gaiety,  and 
elegance,  and  wit,  which  they  couldn't  under- 
stand, but  vaguely  felt  was  as  much  an  ex- 
pression of  Christ  as  their  own  wizened 
virtue." 

Out  of  the  silence  of  two  years  at  last 
came  a  letter  from  her.  I  found  it  when  I 
came  in  very  late  one  night,  and  for  a  long 
time  I  stood  in  my  little  hall  and  examined 
the  Eastern  stamp  and  postmark;  and  the 
writing  on  the  envelope  was  so  exactly  the 
same  as  on  the  last  note  she  had  sent  me 
before  leaving  England  that  I  had  to  smile 
at  the  idea  of  Shelmerdene,  in  the  rush  of 
her  last  pursuit  of  her  perfect  fate,  laying  in 
a  sufficient  store  of  her  own  special  nibs  to 
last  her  for  the  lifetime  she  intended  to  spend 
abroad;  for  when  I  opened  the  letter  I  found 
that,  as  I  had  guessed,  she  would  never  come 
back  to  England,  saying,  "I  am  a  fugitive 


The  London   Venture  143 

branch  which  has  at  last  found  its  parent 
tree.  ...  I  have   run  my  perfect  fate  to 
earth,  Dikran !  more  perfect  than  any  dream, 
more  lasting  than  the  most  perfect  dream. 
And  life  is  so  beautiful  that  I  can  scarcely 
bear  your  not  being  here  to  share  it,  for,  you 
see,  I  am  quite  sure  that  you  are  still  the 
dear  you  were  two  years  ago.     But  it  is  so 
tiresome  of  you  to  be  so  young,  and  to  have 
to  experience  so  many  things  before  you  can 
qualify  for  my  sort  of  happiness;  and  on  top 
of  being  young  you  are  so  restless  and  fussy, 
too,  with  your  ideas  of  what  you  are  going 
to  do,  and  your  ambitions — how  it  must  tire 
the  mind  to  be  ambitious!     It  would  cer- 
tainly tire  mine  in  this  climate,  so  will  you 
please  make  a  note  of  the  fact  that  I  simply 
forbid  you  to  come  out  here  to  join  me !    You 
are  too  young  to  be  happy,  and  you  aren't 
wise  enough  to  be  contented;  and  you  can't 
hope  to  be  wise  enough  until  you  begin  to 
lose  a  bit  of  that  mane  of  hair  of  yours, 
which  I  hope  you  never  will,  for  I  remember 
how  I  loved  one  particular  wave  in  it  in  the 
far-off  age  when  I  thought  I  was  in  love 
with  you.  ...  It  is  terrible,  but  I  am  for- 


144  The  London   Venture 

getting  England.     Terrible,  because  it  must 
be  wrong  to  forget  one's  country,  seeing  how 
you  oppressed  nationalities  go  on  remember- 
ing your  wretched  countries  for  centuries  of 
years,  and  throwing  bombs  and  murdering 
policemen  for  all  the  world  as  though  you 
weren't  just  as  happy  as  every  one  else,  while 
I,  with  a  country,  which  is  after  all  worth 
remembering,  go  and  forget  it  after  a  paltry 
two  years !     Of  course  it  will  always  be  my 
country,  and  I  shall  always  love  it  for  the 
good  things  it  has  given  me,  but  as  a  fact  in 
my  life  it  has  faded  into  something  more 
dim  than  a  memory.     A  spell  has  been  put 
upon  me,  Dikran,  to  prevent  a  possible  ache 
in  my  heart  for  the  things  I  was  born  among, 
a  spell  which  has  made  me  forget  Europe  and 
all  my  friends  in  it  except  just  you,  and 
you  because,  in  spite  of  all  your  English  airs, 
you  will  always  be  a  pathetic  little  stranger 
in  a  very  strange. land,  fumbling  for  the  key. 
.  .  .  Ah,  this  wise  old  East  of  mine !  so  old 
and  so  wise,  my  dear,  that  it  knows  for  cer- 
tain that  nothing  is  worth  doing ;  and  as  you 
happen,  perhaps,  on  the  ruins  of  a  long-dead 
city  by  the  desert,  you  can  almost  hear  it 


The  London   Venture  145 

chuckling  to  itself  in  its  hard-earned  wisdom, 
as  though  to  say  that  since  God  Himself  is 
that  very  same  Law  which  creates  men,  and 
cities,  and  religions  only  to  level  them  into 
the  dust  of  the  roads  and  the  sands  of  the 
desert,  why  fight  against  God!  It  is  a  cor- 
rupt and  deadening  creed,  this  of  the  East, 
but  it  has  a  weight  of  ancestral  will  behind 
it  which  forces  you  to  believe  in  it;  and  belief 
in  it  leaves  you  without  your  Western  de- 
fences, and  open  to  be  charmed  into  non- 
resistance,  as  I  and  my  Blue  Bird  have  been 
charmed,  else  perhaps  I  would  not  now  be 
so  happy,  and  might  even  be  dining  with 
you  on  the  terrace  of  the  Hyde  Park  Hotel. 
.  .  .  Rather  bitterly  you  have  often  called 
me  the  slave  of  Ishtar,  though  at  the  time  I 
did  not  know  who  the  lady  was,  for  I  was 
always  rather  weak  about  goddesses  and  such 
like;  but  I  guessed  she  had  something  to  do 
with  love  because  of  the  context,  for  you 
were  developing  your  pleasant  theory  about 
how  I  would  come  to  a  bad  end,  someday. 
.  .  .  Well,  Dikran,  that  'someday'  of  your 
prophecy  has  come.  I've  never  belonged  so 
wholly  to  Ishtar  as  I  do  now  that  I  am  per- 


146  The  London  Venture 

haps  in  the  very  same  country  in  which  she 
once  haunted  the  imagination  of  the  myriad 
East.  I've  made  a  mess  of  life,  I've  come  to 
my  bad  end,  and,  as  I  tell  you,  I  have  never 
known  such  perfect  happiness.  The  world 
couldn't  wish  me  a  worse  fate,  and  I  couldn't 
wish  myself  a  better.  .  .  .  Don't  write  to 
me,  please.  I  can  always  imagine  you  much 
more  clearly  than  your  letters  can  express 
you,  and  if  I  think  of  you  as  doing  big  things, 
as  I  pray  you  may,  it  will  be  better  for  me 
than  knowing  that  you  are  doing  nothing  at 
all,  which  might  easily  happen,  seeing  how 
lazy  you  are.  ...  In  the  dim  ages  I  was 
all  wrong  about  life.  For  I  know  now  that 
restraint  in  itself  is  the  most  perfect  emo- 
tion. .  .  ." 

I  laid  the  letter  down,  and  as  the  windows 
were  already  greying  with  the  March  dawn 
it  did  not  seem  worth  while  going  to  a  sleep- 
less bed;  and  so  I  sat  on  in  my  chair,  draw- 
ing my  overcoat  round  me  for  warmth,  and 
smoked  many  cigarettes.  I  felt  very  old  in- 
deed, for  was  not  that  letter  the  echo  of  a 
long-dead  experience,  and  are  not  long-dead 
experiences  the  peculiar  property  of  old  men*? 


The  London  Venture 


147 


No  visions  of  the  Shelmerdene  of  that  letter 
came  up  to  disturb  my  peace,  for  she  did  not 
fit  in  with  my  ideas  of  the  East,  she  had 
never  appealed  to  that  Eastern  side  which 
must  be  somewhere  in  me,  but  had  always 
been  to  me  a  perfect  symbol  of  the  grace 


<««MM 


A 


and  kindliness  and  devilry  of  the  arrogant 
West.  I  could  not  see  her  as  she  described 
herself,  happy,  meditative,  wise  in  content- 
ment. .  .  .  Her  contentment  is  too  much 
like  an  emotion,  and  therefore  spurious,  I 
thought,  and  so  she  will  still  dine  with  me 
on  the  terrace  of  the  Hyde  Park  Hotel,  and 
will  wonder  why  I  look  so  differently  at  her, 
for  I  will  still  be  young  while  she  will  be 


148  The  London  Venture 

middle-aged.  .  .  .  No,  that  letter  conjured 
up  no  perfect  vision  of  her  in  the  East,  ex- 
cept that  I  saw  her,  melodramatically  per- 
haps, pleading  on  her  knees  for  release  from 
the  bonds  of  Ishtar,  for  I  knew  that  not  even 
a  Shelmerdene  among  women  can  evade  the 
penalty  of  so  many  unsuccessful  love-affairs 
just  by  the  success  of  one. 

The  grey  of  the  March  dawn  became 
paler,  and  the  furniture  and  books  in  my 
room  seemed  so  wan  and  unreal  that  I 
thought  drowsily  that  they  were  a  dream  of 
last  night  and  were  fading  before  the  com- 
ing daylight;  and  later,  when  my  thoughts 
had  mellowed  into  a  security  of  retrospect, 
I  may  have  slept,  for  I  realised  with  a  start 
that  the  maid  had  come  in  to  tidy  up  the 
room  for  breakfast,  but  had  got  no  further 
than  the  door,  perhaps  wondering  whether  I 
had  been  very  drunk  the  night  before,  or 
only  just  "gay." 

Retrospect  came  naturally  after  that  let- 
ter, for  she  had  written  at  the  end  how  she 
had  found  the  true  worth  of  "restraint";  it 
would  have  been  just  a  phrase  in  a  letter  if 
I  had  not  remembered,   as  she  must  have 


The  London   Venture  149 

when  she  wrote  it,  that  the  word  had  a  con- 
text, and  that  the  context  lay  in  a  long 
summer  afternoon  on  a  silent  reach  of  the 
river  many  miles  from  Maidenhead.  .  .  . 
One  day  that  summer  I  had  suggested  to  her 
that,  as  the  world  was  becoming  a  nuisance 
with  its  heat  and  dust,  we  might  go  and 
stay  on  the  river  for  a  few  days,  but  she 
had  said,  quite  firmly,  "No,  I  can't  do  that. 
I  am  not  yet  old  enough  to  put  my  name 
down  for  the  divorce  stakes,  so  if  you  don't 
mind,  Dikran,  we  will  call  that  bet  off  and 
think  of  something  else.  For  if  that  same 
husband  heard  of  my  staying  on  the  river 
with  a  young  man  of  uncelibate  eye  and 
uncertain  occupation,  he  would  at  once  take 
steps  about  it,  and  although  I  like  you  well 
enough  as  a  man,  I  couldn't  bear  you  as  a 
co-respondent.  .  .  .  But  if  you  really  do 
want  to  stay  on  the  river,  I  will  get  the 
Hartshorns  to  ask  us  both  down,  for  they 
have  a  delightful  house  on  a  little  hill,  from 
which  you  can  see  the  twilight  creeping 
over  the  Berkshire  downs  across  the 
river. 

"Oh,   we  can't  do  that,"   I  said;   "Guy 


150  The  London  Venture 

Hartshorn  is  such  a  stiffnecked  ass  and  his 
wife  is  dull  enough  to  spoil  any  river — " 

"Tolerance,  my  dear,  is  what  you  lack," 
she  said;  "tolerance  and  a  proper  under- 
standing of  the  relation  between  a  stiff- 
necked  ass  and  a  possible  host.  And  Guy, 
poor  dear,  always  does  his  duty  by  his  guests. 
.  .  .  Please  don't  be  silly  about  it,  Dikran. 
The  Hartshorns  distinctly  need  encourage- 
ment as  hosts,  so  you  and  I  will  go  down  and 
encourage  them.  And  if  you  can  manage  to 
cloak  your  evil  thoughts  behind  a  hearty 
manner  and  watch  Guy  as  he  swings  a  rac- 
ing punt  down  the  river,  you  will  learn  more 
about  punting  and  the  reason  why  English- 
men are  generally  considered  to  be  superior 
to  foreigners  than  I  could  teach  you  in  a 
lifetime." 

We  had  been  two  days  at  the  house  on 
the  little  hill  by  the  river  (for,  of  course, 
we  went  there)  before,  on  the  third  after- 
noon, after  lunch,  our  chance  came,  and  Shel- 
merdene  and  I  were  at  last  alone  on  the  river; 
I  had  not  the  energy  to  do  more  than  paddle 
very  leisurely  and  look  from  here  to  there, 
but  always  in  the  end  to  come  back  to  the 


The  London  Venture  151 

woman  who  lay  facing  me  against  the  pale 
green  cushions  of  the  Hartshorn  punt, 
steeped  in  the  happy  sunshine  of  one  of  those 
few  really  warm  days  which  England  now 
and  again  manages  to  steal  from  the  molten 
South,  and  exhibits  in  a  new  green  and 
golden  loveliness.  From  round  a  bend  of 
the  river  we  could  quite  clearly  see  the  ivy- 
covered  Georgian  house  of  our  host,  perched 
imperiously  up  on  the  top  of  its  little  hill, 
but  not  imperiously  enough  to  prevent  the 
outlet  of  two  days'  impatience  in  the  curse 
I  vented  on  it. 

"Little  man  with  little  toy  wants  big  toy 
of  the  same  pattern  and  cries  when  he  can't 
have  it,"  she  mocked  me,  and  smiled  away 
my  bad  temper,  which  had  only  a  shallow 
root  in  impatience.  But  I  would  not  let  it  go 
all  at  once,  for  man  is  allowed  licence  on 
summer  afternoons  on  the  river,  and  I  chal- 
lenged her  to  say  if  she  did  not  know  of  bet- 
ter ways  of  spending  the  whole  glorious  time 
between  dinner  and  midnight  than  by  play- 
ing bridge,  "as  we  tiresomely  do  at  the  house 
on  the  hill,  much  to  the  delight  of  that 
sombre  weeping  elm  which  looks  in  at  the 


152  The  London   Venture 

window  and  can  then  share  the  burden  of  its 
complaining  leaves  with  my  pessimistic 
soul." 

"We  will  leave  your  soul  severely  alone 
for  the  moment,  but  as  for  playing  bridge,  I 
think  it  is  very  good  for  you,"  she  said.  "It 
is  very  good  for  you  to  call  three  No  Trumps, 
and  be  doubled  by  some  one  who  won't  stand 
any  nonsense,  and  go  down  four  hundred  or 
so.     It  teaches  you  restraint." 

"Restraint,"  I  said,  "is  the  Englishman's 
art  of  concealing  his  emotions  in  such  a  way 
that  every  one  can  guess  exactly  what  they 
are.  And  I  have  acquired  it  so  perfectly 
that  you  know  very  well  that  only  the  other 
day  you  told  me  how  you  admired  my  re- 
straint, and  how  I  would  never  say  to  a  man's 
face  what  I  couldn't  say  just  as  well  behind 
his  back."  But  she  did  not  answer,  and  in 
silence  I  pulled  into  a  little  aimless  back- 
water, and  moored  by  a  willow  which  let 
through  just  enough  sun  to  speck  Shelmer- 
dene's  dress  with  bright  arabesques. 

I  changed  my  seat  for  the  cushions  and  lay 
full  length  in  front  of  Shelmerdene,  but  it 
was  as  though  she  had  become  part  of  the 


The  London   Venture  153 

river,  she  was  so  silent.  I  said  something, 
I  can't  remember  what  it  was,  but  it  must 
have  suited  the  day  and  my  mood.  I  could 
not  see  her  face  because  she  had  turned  it 
towards  the  bank  and  it  was  hidden  under 
the  brim  of  her  pale  blue  hat,  but  when  my 
words  had  broken  the  quietness  and  she 
turned  it  towards  me,  I  was  surprised  at  the 
firm  set  of  her  lips  and  the  sadness  of  her 
smile. 

"You  are  making  love  to  me,  and  that  is 
quite  as  it  should  be,"  she  said.  "But  on 
the  most  beautiful  of  all  days  I  have  the 
saddest  thoughts,  for  though  you  laughed  at 
me  when  I  talked  about  restraint,  I  was 
really  very  serious  indeed.  I  know  a  lot 
about  restraint,  my  dear,  and  how  the  lack 
of  it  can  make  life  suddenly  very  horrible 
.  .  .  for  once  upon  a  time  I  killed  an  old 
man  because  I  didn't  know  the  line  between 
my  desires  and  his  endurance."  She  shook 
her  head  at  me  gently.  "No,  that  won't  do, 
Dikran.  You  were  going  to  say  something 
pretty  about  my  good  manners,  but  that  is 
all  so  much  play-acting,  and,  besides,  good 
manners  are  my  trade  and  profession,  and 


154  The  London   Venture 

without  them  I  should  long  ago  have  been 
down  and  under,  as  I  deserve  to  be  much 
more  than  Emma  Hamilton  ever  did.  .  .  . 
The  tragedy  about  people  like  me  is  that  we 
step  into  life  at  the  deep  end  and  find  only 
the  shallow  people  there,  and  when  we  meet 
some  one  really  deep  and  very  sincere,  like 
that  old  man,  we  rather  resent  it,  for  we 
can't  gauge  him  by  the  standards  we  use  for 
each  other.  Men  like  that  bring  a  sudden 
reality  into  life,  but  the  reality  is  unaccept- 
able and  always  ugly  because  it  is  forced 
upon  one,  while  the  only  realities  that  are 
beautiful  are  those  that  were  born  in  your 
heart  when  you  were  born;  just  like  your 
country  for  you,  which  you  have  never  seen 
and  may  never  see,  and  yet  has  been  your 
main  reality  in  life  since  you  were  born;  a 
reality  as  sad  and  beautiful  as  the  ancestral 
memories  which  must  lurk  somewhere  in  you> 
but  which  you  can't  express  because  you  have 
not  learnt  yet  how  to  be  really  natural  with 
yourself.  And  when  you  have  learnt  that 
you  will  have  learnt  the  secret  of  great  writ- 
ing, for  literature  is  the  natural  raw  material 
which  every  man  secretes  within  himself,  but 


The  London   Venture  155 

only  a  few  can  express  it  to  the  world.  But 
I  may  be  wrong  about  all  that,  and  anyway 
you  must  know  a  great  deal  more  about  great 
thinking  and  great  writing  than  I  do,  for 
you  have  read  about  it  in  dull  books  while  I 
have  only  sensed  it  in  my  trivial  way.  .   .   ." 

"Shelmerdene,  I  want  to  hear  about  your 
old  man,"  I  said,  "whom  you  say  you  killed. 
But  that  is  only  your  way  of  saying  that  he 
was  in  love  with  you,  and  that  you  hurt  him 
so  much  that  he  died  of  it." 

"Ah,  if  it  had  been  only  that  I  would  not 
be  so  sad  this  afternoon!  In  fact,  I  would 
not  be  sad  at  all,  for  he  was  old  and  had 
to  die,  and  all  that  about  love  and  being 
hurt  is  fair  and  open  warfare.  But  it  was 
something  much  beastlier  than  that,  some- 
thing animal  in  me,  which  will  make  me 
ashamed  whenever  I  think  of  that  day  when 
we  three  gave  our  horses  rein  down  to  the 
Breton  coast,  and  I  turned  on  the  old  man, 
a  very  spitfire  of  a  girl  broken  loose  from 
the  restraint  of  English  generations,  forget- 
ting for  one  fierce  moment  that  her  saddle 
was  not  covered  with  the  purple  of  a  Roman 
Augusta,  and  that  she  couldn't  do  as  she 


156  The  London   Venture 

liked  in  a  world  of  old  men.  .  .  .  Have  you 
ever  seen  a  quarrel,  a  real  quarrel,  Dikran'^ 
When  some  one  is  so  bitterly  and  intensely 
angry  that  he  loses  all  hold  on  everything 
but  his  wretched  desire  to  hurt,  and  unchains 
a  beast  which  in  a  second  maims  him  as 
deeply  as  his  enemy — no,  it  maims  him 
more. 

"The  old  Frenchman  was  my  guardian," 
she  said,  "and  the  last  of  a  name  which  you 
can  find  here  and  there  in  Court  Memoirs, 
in  the  thick  of  that  riot  of  gallantry  and 
intrigue  which  passed  for  life  at  old  Ver- 
sailles. But  the  world  has  grown  out  of  that 
and  does  things  much  better  now,  for  gal- 
lantry has  been  scattered  to  the  four  winds 
of  democracy  and  is  the  navvy's  part  as  much 
as  the  gentleman's,  while  intrigue  has  become 
the  monopoly  of  the  few  darling  old  men 
who  lead  governments,  more  as  a  way  of 
amusing  their  daughters  than  for  any  special 
purpose  of  their  own.  But  if  the  world  has 
grown  old  since  then  so  had  my  old  man,  for 
he  was  none  of  your  rigid-minded  cidevant 
aristos  whom  you  can  see  any  day  at  the 
Ritz  keeping  up  appearances  on  an  occa- 


The  London   Venture  157 

sional  cocktail  and  the  use  of  the  hotel  note- 
paper;  but  the  air  of  the  grand  seigneur 
hadn't  weathered  proscriptions  and  revolu- 
tions for  nothing,  and  so  still  clung  rather 
finely  to  him  in  spite  of  himself,  and  made 
him  seem  as  old  and  faded  as  his  ancestors 
in  the  world  in  which  he  had  to  live,  poor 
old  dear!  It  was  cruel  of  that  other  nice 
old  gentleman  above  him  to  put  him  through 
the  ordeal,  for  he  did  so  bitterly  and  genu- 
inely resent  a  world  in  which  honour  was  sec- 
ond to  most  things  and  above  nothing.  He 
couldn't  forgive,  you  see.  He  couldn't  for- 
give himself,  nor  France,  nor  God,  but  espe- 
cially he  couldn't  forgive  France.  Sedan, 
revolution,  republic — and  no  Turenne  or 
Bonaparte  to  thrash  a  Moltke  with  the  flat 
of  his  sword,  for  he  wasn't  worth  more! 
And  all  a  France  could  muster  were  the  trink- 
ets of  her  monde  and  demimonde,  and  a 
threatening  murmur  of  'revanche'  and  'Al- 
sace-Lorraine'— as  though  threats  and  hatred 
could  wipe  out  the  memory  of  that  day  of 
surrender  at  Sedan,  when  he  stood  not  ten 
yards  away  among  only  too  polite  Prussian 
aides-de-camp  while  Napoleon  put  the  seal 


158  The  London   Venture 

on  his  last  mistake,  and  signed  away  an  em- 
pire. .  .  .  And  allowing  for  exaggeration, 
and  the  white-hot  excitement  to  which  folk 
who  fuss  about  honour,  etc.,  are  liable,  there 
may  have  been  something  in  his  point  of 
view  about  it  all,  for  I  once  heard  a  man 
with  a  lot  of  letters  behind  his  name  say  that 
when  a  country  gives  up  a  limb  it  also  gives 
up  its  body;  but  he  may  have  been  wrong, 
for  after  all  France  is  still  France! 

"But  you  would  have  adored  my  old  man, 
Dikran,  just  as  I  did.  He  treated  life,  and 
men,  and  women  with  all  that  etiquette 
which  you  so  admire,  he  was  simply  bris- 
tling with  etiquette — a  deal  too  much  of  it 
for  my  taste,  for  I  was  only  seventeen  then 
and  liked  my  freedom  like  any  other  Eng- 
lander.  .  .  .  But  I'm  finding  it  very  diffi- 
cult to  describe  the  man  he  was,  my  dear, 
for  in  our  slovenly  sort  of  English  we've  got 
used  to  describing  a  person  by  saying  he  is 
like  another  person,  and  I  can't  do  that  in 
this  case  because  he  belongs  as  much  to  a 
past  age  as  Hannibal,  and  there  isn't  any 
one  like  him  now.  And  even  when  he  was 
alive  there  were  very  few — two  or  three  old 


The  London   Venture  159 

men  as  fierce  and  unyielding  and  vital  as 
himself,  who  used  to  come  and  dine,  and 
say  pretty  things  to  little  me  who  sat  at 
the  end  of  the  table  with  very  large  eyes 
and  fast-beating  heart,  wondering  why  they 
weren't  all  leading  Cabinets  and  squashing 
revolutions,  for  they  seemed  to  know  the 
secrets  of  every  secret  cabal  and  camarilla 
in  Europe. 

"Yes,  my  old  guardian  was  a  remnant  of 
an  empire — but  what  a  remnant!  Such  a 
fierce-looking  little  man  he  was,  with  pale, 
steel-blue  eyes  which  pierced  into  you  from 
under  a  precipice  of  a  forehead,  a  bristling 
Second  Empire  moustache,  and  thin  blood- 
less lips  which  parted  before  the  most  ex- 
quisite French  I've  ever  heard;  I  can 
scarcely  bear  it  when  you  say  I  talk  French 
divinely,  for  I  know  how  pitiful  mine  is  com- 
pared to  the  real  thing,  as  done  by  that  old 
man  and  Sarah  Bernhardt,  for  they  were 
very  old  friends  and  she  used  often  to  come 
and  lunch  with  us. 

"He  talked  well,  too,  and  all  the  better 
for  having  something  to  say,  as  well  he 
might  have  since  he  had  been  everything  and 


,160  The  London   Venture 

known  every  one  worth  knowing  of  his  time 
— ministers,  and  rebels,  and  artists,  and  all 
the  best-known  prostitutes  of  the  day;  but 
they  did  those  things  better  then,  Dikran. 
In  fact,  more  as  an  excuse  for  getting  away 
from  a  parvenu  Paris  than  from  any  Bona- 
partist  feelings,  for  he  was  always  an  Or- 
leanist,  I  think  he  had  represented  Louis 
Napoleon  at  every  city  which  could  run  to 
an  Embassy  from  London  to  Pekin;  from 
where  he  brought  back  that  ivory  Buddha 
which  is  on  my  writing-table,  and  which  has 
an  inscription  in  ancient  Chinese  saying  that 
every  man  is  his  own  god,  but  that  Buddha 
is  every  man's  God,  which  goes  a  long  way 
to  prove  that  the  wisdom  of  the  East  wasn't 
as  wise  as  all  that,  after  all. 

"But  you  are  getting  restless,"  she  said 
suddenly.  "You  probably  want  to  open  the 
tea-basket  to  see  what's  inside,  or  you've  just 
seen  a  water  rat " 

"No,  it's  a  little  more  subtle  than  that, 
Shelmerdene,  although  as  a  fact  I  do  see  a 
water  rat  not  a  yard  from  you  on  the  bank. 
...  I  merely  wanted  to  know  how  it  was 
that,  since  you  had  a  perfectly  good  father 


The  London   Venture  161 

alive  in  England,  you  were  allowed  to  go 
gadding  about  in  France  with  a  guardian, 

soi-disant " 

"We  will  ignore  your  soi-disant,  young 
man.  But  I'll  allow  your  interruption,  for 
it  may  seem  a  bit  complicated.  ...  It  was 
like  this :  as  the  fortunes  of  our  family  had 
run  rather  to  seed  through  generations  of 
fast  women  and  slow  horses,  my  father  who 
was  utterly  a  pet,  succumbed  to  politics  for 
an  honest  living,  or,  if  you  pull  a  face  like 
that  about  it,  for  a  dishonest  living.  For  up 
to  that  time,  in  spite  of  having  exactly  the 
figure  for  it,  he  had  always  refused  to  enter 
Parliament,  because  his  idea  was  that  the 
House  was  just  a  club,  and  one  already  be- 
longed to  so  many  better  clubs.  But  once 
there  nothing  could  stop  him,  and  when  he 
entered  for  the  Cabinet  stakes  he  simply 
romped  home  with  a  soft  job  and  a  fat  in- 
come. .  .  .  But  all  that  is  really  beside  the 
point,  for  between  politics  and  guineas  father 
and  I  had  had  a  slight  disagreement  about 
a  certain  young  man  whom  I  was  inclined  to 
marry  offhand,  being  only  sixteen,  you  know, 
and  liking  the  young  man — and,  of  course, 


162  The  London   Venture 

my  father  did  the  correct  thing,  as  he  always 
did,  gave  the  young  man  a  glass  of  port  and 
told  him  not  to  be  an  ass,  and  shipped  me 
off  to  Paris  to  his  very  old  friend.  You 
see,  he  knew  about  that  old  Marquis,  and 
how  I'd  be  quite  safe  in  his  care,  for  any 
young  man  who  as  much  as  looked  at  me 
would  have  a  pair  of  gimlet  eyes  asking  him 
who  the  devil  he  might  be  and  why  he  chose 
to  desecrate  a  young  lady's  virginal  beauty 
by  his  so  fatuous  gaze. 

"I've  been  saying  a  lot  of  nice  things  about 
that  old  man  to  you,  but  I  didn't  feel  quite 
like  that  about  him  at  the  time.  I  liked 
him,  of  course,  because  he  was  a  man;  but 
all  that  French  business  about  the  sanctity 
of  a  young  maid's  innocence  got  badly  on 
my  nerves,  for  innocence  was  never  my  long 
suit  even  from  childhood,  having  ears  to  hear 
and  eyes  to  see;  and  I  soon  began  to  get 
very  bored  with  life  as  my  old  Frenchman 
saw  it.  So  it  wasn't  surprising  that  I  broke 
out  now  and  again  just  to  shock  him,  he  was 
so  rigid,  but  I  was  always  sorry  for  it  after- 
wards because  he  just  looked  at  me  and  said 
not  a  word  for  a  minute  or  so,  and  then  went 


The  London   Venture  163 

on  talking  as  though  I  hadn't  hurt  him — 
but  I  had,  Dikran !  I  had  hurt  him  so  much 
that  for  the  rest  of  the  day  he  often  couldn't 
bear  to  see  me.  .  .  .  But  though  I  was 
ashamed  of  myself  for  hurting  him,  I 
couldn't  stop;  life  with  him  was  interesting 
enough  in  a  way,  of  course,  but  it  left  out 
so  much,  you  see;  it  entirely  left  out  the 
stupendous  fact  that  I  was  almost  a  woman, 
and  a  very  feminine  one  at  that,  who  liked 
an  odd  young  man  about  now  and  again  just 
to  play  about  with.  But  I  wasn't  allowed 
any  young  men,  except  a  twenty-five-year- 
old  over-manicured  Vicomte  who  was  so  un- 
bearably worldly  and  useless  that  I  wanted 
to  hit  him  on  the  head  with  my  guardian's 
sword-stick,  which  he  always  carried  about 
with  him,  as  a  sort  of  mental  solace,  I  think. 
No,  there  weren't  any  young  men,  nor  any 
restaurants,  for  the  old  man  simply  ignored 
them ;  my  dear,  there  wasn't  anything  at  all 
in  my  young  life  except  a  few  old  dukes  and 
dowagers,  and  the  aforesaid  young  Vicomte, 
who  had  manicured  himself  out  of  existence 
and  was  considered  harmless.  And  so  Paris 
was  a  dead  city  to  me  who  lived  in  the  heart 


164  The  London  Venture 

of  it,  and  all  the  more  dead  for  the  faded 
old  people  who  moved  about  in  my  life,  and 
tried  to  change  my  heart  into  a  Louis-Quinze 
drawing-room  hung  with  just  enough  beauti- 
ful and  musty  tapestries  to  keep  out  the  bour- 
geois sunshine  and  carelessness,  which  I  so 
longed  for. 

"So  I  had  to  amuse  myself  somehow.  .  .  . 
I  was  a  bad  young  woman  then,  as  I  am  a 
bad  woman  now,  Dikran;  for  I've  always 
had  a  particular  sort  of  vanity  which,  though 
it  doesn't  show  on  the  surface  like  most  silly 
women's,  is  deep  down  in  me  and  has  never 
left  me  alone ;  a  sort  of  vanity  which  makes 
itself  felt  in  me  only  in  the  off-seasons  when 
no  one  happens  to  be  in  love  with  me  and  I 
in  love  with  jio  one,  and  tells  me  that  I  must 
be  dull  and  unattractive,  utterly  insignifi- 
cant and  non-existent;  it  is  a  weakness  in 
me,  but  much  stronger  than  I  am,  for  I've 
never  resisted  it,  but  been  only  too  glad  to 
fall  in  love  again  as  soon  as  I  could;  and 
that  is  why  I've  never  made  a  stand  against 
my  impressionableness,  why  I've  never  run 
away  from  or  scotched  a  love-affair  which  I 
knew  wouldn't  last  two  weeks,  however  much 


The  London  Venture  165 

I  loved  the  wretched  man  at  the  time ;  it  was 
so  much  the  line  of  least  resistance,  it 
drowned  that  infernal  whisper  in  me  that  I 
was  of  no  account  at  all  in  the  world.  But 
the  tragedy  of  it  was,  and  is,  my  dear,  that 
indulgence  made  the  monster  grow;  it  was 
like  a  drug,  for  as  soon  as  the  off-season  came 
again  it  was  at  its  old  tricks  with  twice  its 
old  virulence  and  malice,  and,  of  course,  I 
gave  way  again.  And  so  on,  and  so  on — 
did  you  murmur  dies  ir&,  Dikran?  Well, 
perhaps,  but  who  knows?  There's  a  Per- 
fect Fate  for  every  one  in  this  world,  and 
if  any  one  deserves  to  find  it,  it's  myself  who 
has  failed  to  find  it  so  often.  .  .  . 

"At  that  time  that  wretched  vanity  of 
mine  was  only  a  faint  whisper,  but  there  it 
was,  and  it  had  to  be  satisfied,  or  else  I  should 
have  become  a  good  woman,  which  never  did 
attract  me  very  much.  I  simply  had  to  amuse 
myself  somehow — and  so  I  formed  la  grande 
idee  of  my  young  life,  just  as  Napoleon  III 
had  long  ago  formed  his  equally  grande  idee 
about  Mexico  and  Maximilian,  and  with  the 
same  disastrous  results.  True,  there  was  no 
young  man  about,  but  there  was  a  man,  any- 


166  The  London  Venture 

way,  and  a  Marquis  to  boot,  even  though  he 
was  a  bit  old  and  rigid.  But  it  was  exactly 
that  rigidity  of  his  which  I  wanted  to  see 
about;  I  wanted  to  find  out  things,  and  in 
my  own  way,  don't  you  see1?  And  so,  de- 
liberately and  with  all  the  malice  in  me,  I 
set  out  to  subdue  the  old  man.  Not  child- 
ishly and  gushingly,  although  I  was  so 
young,  but  with  all  the  finesse  of  the  eternal 
game,  for  clever  women  are  born  with  rouge 
on  their  cheeks. 

"But  it  was  a  disappointing  business;  I 
didn't  seem  to  make  the  impression  I  wanted 
to  make;  all  my  finesse  went  for  nothing, 
except  as  signs  of  the  affection  of  a  ward. 
Obviously,  I  thought  hopelessly,  I  don't 
know  all  there  is  to  be  known  about  subdu- 
ing old  French  marquises,  and  I  had  almost 
decided  to  try  some  other  amusement  when 
one  May  morning,  a  few  months  after  my 
father  had  died  and  appointed  him  as  my 
guardian  and  executor,  he  came  into  my  lit- 
tle boudoir,  looking  more  stern  and  adorable 
than  ever.  And  as  he  came  in  I  knew  some- 
how that  big  things  were  coming  into  my 
little  life;  I  don't  know  how,  but  I  knew  it 


The  London   Venture  167 

as  surely  as  I  knew  that  for  all  his  grand 
air  of  calmness  he  was  as  shy  as  any  school- 
boy. 

"  'My  child,'  he  said  very  gently,  'I  am 
intruding  on  you  only  because  I  have  some- 
thing to  say  to  you  of  the  utmost  importance 
and  delicacy.  I  am  too  old  and  too  much  of 
the  world  to  do  things  by  impulse,  and  so 
if  I  seem  to  offend  against  your  unworldli- 
ness  now  it  is  not  because  I  have  not  thought 
very  carefully  about  what  I  am  going  to  say. 
.  .  .  And  I  beg  you  not  to  count  it  as  any 
more  than  the  suggestion  of  an  old  man  who 
thinks  only  of  your  good,  and  to  tell  me 
quite  frankly  at  the  end  what  you  think  of 
it. 

"  'My  old  friend,  your  father/  he  said, 
'honoured  me  by  placing  you  entirely  in  my 
charge  as  guardian  and  executor ;  but  on  look- 
ing into  matters  I  find  that  he  has  left  very 
little  for  me  to  do  in  the  latter  capacity — 
very  little,  in  fact,  besides  that  small  estate 
in  Shropshire  which  is  entailed  on  you  and 
your  children,  as  with  all  its  associations  of 
that  beautiful  girl — scarcely  older  than  you 
are  now,  your  mother — your  father  could  not 


168  The  London   Venture 

bear  the  thought  of  it  ever  passing  to 
strangers.  And  so.  my  child,  without  any 
reflection  on  my  friend,  when  you  leave  my 
care  you  enter  the  world  with  an  old  enough 
name  to  ensure  your  position,  but  without 
the  income  to  maintain  it,  and,  if  you  will 
forgive  me,  a  quite  insignificant  dot;  though 
in  your  case,  as  in  your  beautiful  mother's,' 
he  added,  with  his  little  gallant  smile,  the 
first  and  last  of  the  morning,  'a  dot  would 
be  the  requirement  of  a  blind  man. 

"  'All  this  preamble  must  seem  very  aim- 
less and  tiresome  to  you,  but  I  wish  to  put 
all  the  facts  before  you,  my  dear,  before 
asking  you  to  take  the  responsibility,  as  in- 
deed it  is,  of  weighing  the  suggestion  I  am 
going  to  make.  .  .  .  You  must  have  seen 
that  I  am  out  of  sympathy  with  this  modern 
world  of  yours,  that  I  belong  to  some  other 
period,  better  or  worse,  what  does  it  matter? 
And  this  world,  my  child,  has  little  use  for 
those  hard-headed  persons  who  cannot  change 
the  bent  of  their  minds  according  to  its  pass- 
ing whims,  and  so  it  has  little  use  for  me 
who  cannot  and  will  not  change.  .  .  .  Do 
you  understand?    I  mean  that  I  am  an  old 


The  London   Venture  169 

man  who  is  every  day  losing  touch  with  life, 
and  that  I  know  here,  quite  certainly,  that 
I  have  only  a  very  few  more  years  to  live. 
Do  not  look  sad,  child,'  he  said,  almost  im- 
patiently, 'it  is  not  that  I  am  complaining, 
but  that  I  wish  you  to  understand  my 
thoughts.  .  .  .  Into  an  old  life  you  have 
come  like  a  ray  of  sunshine  which  is  even 
now  making  light  of  your  little  puzzled 
frown;  and  I  have  a  debt  of  gratitude  to 
pay  to  you,  my  child,  which  I  wish  to  pay 
at  the  expense  even  of  your  young  peace  of 
mind  this  morning.  Although  this  new 
world  has  passed  out  of  my  grasp,  and  will 
soon  pass  out  of  my  understanding,  I  know 
that  it  is  the  proper  setting  for  you,  the  only 
subtle  and  beautiful  thing  that  I  have  found 
in  it,  and  my  greatest  wish  is  to  leave  you 
in  a  position  worthy  of  your  beauty  and  in- 
telligence. It  is  not  that  I  am  afraid  for 
you,  for  you  are  no  trivial  chit  of  a  girl,  but 
merely  that  I  wish  to  leave  you  both  happy 
and  independent.  .  .  .  And,  as  it  is,  I  can 
do  nothing,  nothing  at  all !  For  it  has  been 
a  fixed  rule  of  our  family  that  we  may  not 
leave  our  fortune  and  property  to  any  one 


170  The  London   Venture 

who  does  not  bear  our  name,  and  thus,  though 
my  nephew  and  I  have  had  no  occasion  to 
meet  for  some  fifteen  years,  I  must  leave  him 
such  money  as  I  have  and  all  this  not  unap- 
preciated furniture.  .  .  .  And  that  is  why, 
my  child,  because  of  my  wish  to  leave  you 
all  I  have,  I  have  been  forced  to  suggest  the 
only  alternative,  for  I  would  not  have  even 
considered  it  otherwise,  that  you  should  con- 
sent to  bear  my  name  with  me  for  the  few 
years  I  have  to  live,  and  then,  as  a  young 
and  beautiful  widow  of  means,  and  bearing 
an  old  French  name  which  may  still  be  worth 
a  little  consideration,  you  can  take  your  fit 
position  in  the  world  in  which  you,  and  not 
I,  were  born  to  be  happy.  .  .  .' 

"There  it  is,  Dikran,  or  as  much  of  it  as 
I  can  remember.  And  do  you  need  a  setting 
for  it?  Oh,  yes,  you  do,  for  you  are  a  lit- 
tle lost.  Imagine  then,  sitting  by  a  window 
of  a  large  house  in  the  Rue  Colbert,  a  young 
girl  with  a  battered  copy  of  Madame  Bovary 
skilfully  hidden  beside  her,  and  a  little  erect 
old  man,  very  stiff  but  soigne,  and  cruelly 
aged  by  the  sunlight  which  poured  blessedly 
into  the  room,  standing  by  the  arm  of  her 


The  London   Venture  171 

chair,  asking  her  to  marry  him.  Oh !  but  you 
can't  imagine  it,  you  will  think  of  him  as 
pleading,  and  of  me  as  surprised.  He  didn't 
plead,  he  couldn't  and  I,  my  dear,  by  the 
time  he  had  finished,  wasn't  surprised.  ...  I 
knew,  you  see.  Why,  I  knew  everything! 
Lexicons  and  encyclopaedias  had  toppled  off 
their  dusty  shelves,  and  the  Sibylline  books 
had  come  running  to  my  feet,  and  the  whole 
world  had  come  trotting  out  with  its  wis- 
dom, wisdom  as  clear  and  cold  as  any  Dan- 
nan-Ron  that  your  friend  Gloom  ever  played 
on  his  feadan,  and  all  in  the  few  minutes  that 
an  old  man  was  speaking  to  me !  Of  course, 
it  should  all  have  happened  differently;  I 
should  have  been  just  a  'trivial  chit  of  a 
girl,'  and  then  I  would  have  accepted  all 
the  old  darling  said,  and  gaped,  and  cried, 
and  said  'thank  you.'  But  as  it  was  I  did 
none  of  those  things ;  I'm  not  quite  sure  what 
I  did,  unless  it  was  nothing  at  all.  ...  It 
all  seems  rather  mixed  now,  but  on  that  May 
morning  it  was  as  clear  as  the  sunlight  in 
my  cruel  young  mind — how  young  and  how 
cruel,  Dikran! 

"You  see,  as  he  spoke,  he  opened  out  the 


172  The  London   Venture 

world  which  he  so  despised  to  me;  page  by 
page  he  showed  me  life,  how  beastly  and 
how  beautiful;  he  showed  me  both  sides, 
because  he  himself  was  both  beastly  and 
beautiful.  .  .  .  And  I  gloried  in  it  all !  At 
my  knowledge  and  the  power  it  gave  me 
over  life.  After  a  while  the  old  man  didn't 
seem  to  matter — there  he  was,  talking  away ! 
I  knew  about  him,  and  just  how  beastly  and 
beautiful  he  was.  For  he  was  beautiful  in 
his  sincerity;  I  knew  that  he  wished  for  my 
good,  that  to  leave  me  well  provided  was 
the  only  condition  he  made  with  death;  but 
I  knew  too  that  there  was  a  beastly  little 
imp  somewhere  in  him,  as  in  other  men, 
which  turned  his  finest  thoughts  into  so  much 
bluff,  which  told  him  through  the  locked 
and  bolted  doors  of  his  honour  that  he  wanted 
me  for  my  own  sake,  and  just  for  that,  be- 
cause I  was  young  and  because  he  loved  me, 
and,  stripped  of  all  his  honour  and  guard- 
ianship, because  he  loved  me  just  as  Solomon 
loved  his  wives,  and  Lucifer  loved  Lilith, 
and  as  you  love  me  now.  .  .  . 

"There  it  was,  then,  the  whole  damnable 
world,  and  I,  only  eighteen,  in  the  middle 


The  London   Venture  173 

of  it !  And  there  he  was,  my  dear  old  man, 
more  rigid  and  more  adorable  than  ever ;  for, 
cruel  as  I  was  in  seeing  through  him,  I  loved 
him  all  the  more  for  his  sweet  naivete  and 
for  his  old,  so  old  illusions  about  his  mo- 
tives. While  as  for  being  shocked  at  the 
way  he  loved  me,  I've  never  been  shocked  by 
anything  but  the  vulgarity  and  the  inde- 
cencies of  respectable  people,  who  seem  to 
think  that  sex  is  purely  a  sort  of  indoor  sport 
to  be  indulged  in  darkness  and  behind  barri- 
caded doors,  while  it  is  really  a  setting  for 
the  most  beautiful  Bacchanal  that  was  ever 
devised  by  the  fairest  and  purest  of  God's 
children.  In  spite  of  bibles  and  the  Bishop 
of  London,  Mary  knew  what  she  was  about, 
Dikran.  Love  doesn't  grow  anywhere,  to  be 
picked  up  by  the  wayside.  Pure  beauty 
grows  only  where  beauty  already  is.  .  .  . 

"But,  wise  as  I  was,  I  didn't  know  what 
to  say;  what  could  I  say?  He  was  waiting; 
I  had  to  say,  do  something.  I  did — flung 
my  arms  round  his  neck  and  told  him  he  was 
a  pet  to  be  so  nice  to  me,  and  that  I  must 
think  about  it.  For  the  first  time  that  he 
had   wanted  me   to  behave   like  a   woman 


174  The  London   Venture 

I  behaved  consciously  like  a  child — it 
seemed  the  easiest  way  out.  And  I  think  he 
saw  that  I  was  acting ;  he  had  expected  some- 
thing else,  for  he  smiled  very  sadly  down  at 
me,  and  patted  my  hair,  saying  I  was  a  sweet 
child  not  to  be  angry  with  him  for  making 
life  so  suddenly  serious,  and  then,  very 
gently,  he  went  away,  leaving  me  in  the  sun- 
shine, a  playmate  of  the  gods.  .  .  .  And  yet 
I  was  so  sorry  for  him  that  I  almost  cried 
when  I  thought  of  him  sitting  alone  and 
lonely  in  his  library. 

"We  never  spoke  of  it  again.  At  first  it 
was  as  though  he  was  waiting  for  me  to  say 
yes,  or  no,  or  something,  but  I  didn't  say 
anything,  and,  later,  he  seemed  to  forget. 
I  didn't  do  ,it  out  of  cruelty,  my  dear;  I 
simply  couldn't  say  anything,  that's  all. 
After  sunshine,  rain,  you  know;  I  was  dis- 
mal, frightened  of  him  a  little.  The  ro- 
mance of  that  May  morning  when  he  had 
come  to  me  in  my  room  had  become  a  ridicu- 
lous fantasy,  so  that  it  seemed  to  me  that 
any  reference  to  it  would  rather  tarnish  the 
very  splendid  dignity  which  he  had  kept,  and 
sort  of  increased,   through  it  all.     Besides, 


The  London   Venture  175 

anyway,  what  was  there  to  say?  I  had  made 
up  my  mind  as  he  spoke  that  morning, 
through  all  the  clearness  of  my  new-found 
knowledge.  I  had  never  a  doubt  as  to  what 
I  was  going  to  do.  It  wasn't  in  me  to  do 
as  he  asked,  or  rather,  as  he  advised,  the  old 
dear!  I  wish  it  had  been  in  me,  for  to  be 
a  rich  French  marquise  without  a  marquis  is 
no  bad  fate  for  any  girl,  and  it  might  have 
helped  me  to  steer  clear  of  many  complica- 
tions. But  I  couldn't,  because  all  my  life, 
Dikran,  I've  been  cursed  by  an  utter  inabil- 
ity to  make  any  money  out  of  love.  And 
that  is  why  I  would  never  be  a  success  in  my 
mother's  country  of  America,  where  men 
throw  pearls  and  beauty  roses  about  as  a 
matter  of  course  and  are  very  offended  if 
one  suggests  an  economical  flirtation  on  a 
gross  of  diamonds  and  a  hundredweight  of 
Russian  sables.  ...  It  isn't  that  I  am 
mean-minded,  but  I  cannot  take  presents 
from  men  who  love  me,  for,  after  all,  the  old 
Marquis'  offer  was  a  present.  When  I  see 
other  women  with  relays  of  fur  coats,  and 
pearl  necklaces,  and  no  visible  means  of 
support,  I  am  thoroughly  sorry  for  myself, 


176  The  London   Venture 

for  it  isn't  through  any  excess  of  morals  that 
I  haven't  just  as  many  furs  and  pearls;  it  is 
simply  because  I  don't  see  life  that  way,  as, 
ten  years  ago,  I  didn't  see  life  as  the  wife  of 
an  old  man,  whom  I  adored  but  didn't  love, 
and  couldn't  have  thought  of  marrying  him 
even  if  he  had  promised  to  arrange  for  his 
death  an  hour  after  the  wedding.  .  .  .  Do 
you  understand,  Dikran?  For  all  this  while 
I've  been  trying  to  tell  you  that  whatever 
else  I  am  not,  I  am  an  honest  woman ;  a  very 
upright  gentleman  in  my  way,  which  is  more 
than  you  can  say  for  most  really  nice  women. 
"The  reason  why  realistic  tragedies  are  im- 
possible, or  at  best  only  melodramatic,  on  the 
stage  is  that  the  Person  who  arranges  life  has 
no  sense  of  drama  at  all.  Imagine  how  Sar- 
dou,  the  wretched  man  who  turned  Sarah 
Bernhardt  into  an  exhibition,  would  have 
worked  it  out :  the  young  girl  would  have  run 
away  from  the  lustful  old  man  to  Nice;  the 
old  man  would  have  followed  her  to  her 
boarding-house  and  made  faces  at  the  land- 
lady's fair-haired  son,  who  was  the  girl's  des- 
tiny; a  duel,  tears,  another  duel,  more  tears, 
and  Sarah   falling  about  the   stage   in  ex- 


The  London   Venture  117 

hausted  attitudes,  as  well  she  might.  .  .  . 
And  then  imagine  how  life  worked  out  the 
tragedy  of  that  girl  and  old  man ;  it  let  them 
be,  or  it  seemed  to  let  them  be!  No,  God 
can  have  no  dramatic  sense,  as  we  know  it, 
because  all  the  tragedies  He  arranges  for  us 
are  slow-moving,  so  slow  and  moving  none  of 
the  actors  know  whither;  perhaps  this  trag- 
edy we  are  acting  will  fade  away,  they  say 
hopefully  to  themselves,  and  leave  us  again 
happy  and  careless;  a  little  later  they  are 
happily  sure  that  their  tragedy  is  fading, 
there  is  no  possible  climax  in  sight,  and  then 
suddenly,  out  of  the  inmost  earth,  from  some 
really  foul  spot  of  their  animal  natures,  come 
the  sudden  ingredients  for  the  tragical  cli- 
max; the  climax  lasts  only  a  second,  but 
after  it  no  blessed  curtain  falls ;  God  has  in- 
terfered again,  Life  is  more  cruel  than  Art, 
He  says,  so  away  with  your  tricks,  your  cur- 
tains and  your  finales.  And  I  suppose  He  is 
right,  you  know ;  it  must  be  right  that  shame- 
ful memories  live  beside  the  beautiful  ones, 
as  twenty  years  from  now  the  memory  of  that 
old  man  and  myself  will  live  beside  this  very 
moment  of  you  and  I  under  this  willow ;  for 


178  The  London  Venture 

my  abundant  confession  of  it  all  seems  to 
make  it  as  much  yours  as  mine,  Dikran. 

"My  guardian  and  I  lived  on  smoothly 
enough,  then ;  as  before  I  broke  out  now  and 
again  when  he  stepped  too  sternly  between 
myself  and  an  amusing  indiscretion,  but  re- 
bellions always  ended  in  my  smiling  at  some 
cutting  remark  of  his,  and  in  his  always  sweet 
dismissal  of  the  subject;  there  was  nothing 
to  show  that  we  were  different  with  each 
other.  But  we  were,  indeed  we  were.  I  did 
not  know  it  then,  but  I  knew  it  very  clearly 
later ;  how  we  two  people,  really  loving  each 
other,  though  in  our  different  ways,  had 
found  a  deep,  subtle  antagonism  in  each 
other,  a  very  real  antagonism,  which  it  would 
have  shamed  us  to  realise  at  the  time,  and 
with  a  very  real  and  inevitable  climax;  but 
like  God's  creatures,  mummers  in  yet  another 
of  His  cruelly  monstrous  plays,  we  thought 
the  tragedy  was  fading,  had  faded,  and  were 
forgetting  it,  for  what  climax  could  there 
possibly  be1? 

"Four  or  five  months  after  that  May  morn- 
ing he  took  me  to  stay  at  a  chateau  in 
Brittany;    a   very   beautiful,    tumble-down, 


The  London   Venture  179 

draughty  place,  my  dear,  standing  proudly  at 
the  head  of  a  valley  like  a  dissipated  actor 
who  feels  that  he  must  have  done  great  things 
in  the  past  to  be  what  he  now  is,  and  with 
nothing  to  show  for  its  draughty  arrogance 
but  a  few  rakish  stones  which  were  once  the 
embattlement  from  which  the  Huguenot 
seigneur  of  the  day  defied  the  old  Medici; 
and  the  slim,  white-haired  old  woman  who 
charmingly  met  me  at  the  door,  the  chatelaine 
of  only  one  castle,  but  with  the  dignity  of  an 
empire  in  her  kind,  calm  elegance.  My  host- 
ess and  my  guardian  were  old,  old  friends, 
and  to  watch  them  in  their  gentle,  courteous 
intimacy  was  a  lesson  on  the  perfect  manage- 
ment of  such  things.  When  we  are  old  and 
white-haired,  will  you  come  and  stay  at  my 
place,  Dikran,  and  will  you  pretend  that  you 
have  forgotten  that  you  ever  liked  me  for 
anything  else  than  my  mind?  Just  like  those 
two  old  people  in  the  Breton  chateau,  who  a 
thousand  years  ago  may  have  been  lovers  or 
may  have  only  loved  one  another.  .  .  .  Who 
knows"?  and  does  it  matter? 

"The  idea  of  this  visit,  on  my  guardian's 
part,  to  the  solitary  chateau  from  whose  high- 


180  The  London   Venture 

est  windows  one  could  just  see  the  sea  curl- 
ing round  the  Breton  coast,  was  of  course  ex- 
cellent. He  wanted  me  to  be  out  of  harm's 
way  and  entirely  his  own,  and  was  there  any 
better  way  of  achieving  that  than  by  putting 
me  in  a  lonely  chateau  with  only  my  hostess 
as  an  alternative  to  himself?  But,  poor  old 
dear,  it  didn't  fal1  out  like  that;  for  we  had 
only  been  there  two  days  when  the  alterna- 
tive presented  himself  in  the  person  of  the 
young  man  of  the  house,  my  hostess's  son, 
the  young  lord  of  Tumbledown  Castle.  .  .  . 
He  went  and  spoilt  it  all,  good  and  proper, 
did  that  young  man.  His  mother  hadn't  ex- 
pected him,  my  guardian  didn't  want  him, 
and  I  didn't  mind  him — there  he  was,  all  the 
way  from  England  on  a  sudden  desire  to  see 
his  mother,  the  only  woman  whom  Raoul 
had  ever  a  decent  thought  about,  I  suppose. 
(His  name  wasn't  really  Raoul,  you  know, 
but  it  is  a  sort  of  convention  that  all  young 
Frenchmen  with  the  title  of  Vicomte  and 
with  languid  eyes  and  fragile  natures  are 
called  Raoul.)  For  he  wasn't  by  any  means 
a  nice  young  man,  except  facially,  but  how 
was  I  to  know  that!     And  besides,  the  man 


The  London   Venture  181 

could  sit  a  horse  as  gallantly  as  any  young 
prince  who  ever  went  crusading,  and  I 
strained  my  eyes  in  prolonging  the  little  thrill 
I  had  when,  the  morning  after  he  came,  I 
saw  him  from  a  window  riding  out  of  the 
gates  and  down  into  the  valley,  very  much 
the  young  lord  of  the  manor,  on  the  huge 
white  stallion  which,  with  such  a  master,  de- 
fied a  Republic  and  still  proclaimed  him  as 
the  Sieur  du  Chateau-Mauvrai  to  the  dour 
and  morose-minded  peasants  of  the  Breton 
villages.   .  .  . 

"When  I  say  that  Raoul  was  not  a  nice 
young  man,  I  mean  that  he  was  a  very  agree- 
able companion;  but,  like  little  Billee,  in 
'Trilby,'  and  Maurice,  the  stone-image  of  my 
dreams,  that  poor  young  man  couldn't  love, 
it  wasn't  in  him  to  love ;  but  unlike  the  other 
two,  who  were  sweet  about  it  and  made  up 
for  it  as  much  as  they  could,  Raoul  had  taken 
it  into  his  head  that  love  was  all  stuff  and 
nonsense,  anyway,  and  that  he  could  do  a 
deal  better  with  the  very  frequent  and  not 
very  fastidious  pretences  of  it;  and,  accord- 
ing to  his  little-minded  lights,  he  seems  to 
have  been  right,   for  he  had  already  done 


182  The  London   Venture 

fairly  well  for  himself  in  London — this  I 
found  much  later,  of  course — with  a  flat  in 
Mayfair  which  was  much  more  consistent 
with  the  various  middle-aged  ladies  who 
came  to  tea  with  him  than  with  the  extent  of 
his  income. 

"No  reasonable  person  could  expect  that 
a  young  man  like  that  and  I  could  stay  in 
the  same  house  and  no  trouble  come  of  it. 
But  my  guardian  wasn't  reasonable.  He 
seemed  still  to  expect  me  to  go  riding  with 
him,  and  let  a  perfectly  good  young  man  run 
to  waste  for  want  of  a  companion  to  say 
pretty  things  to.  Raoul  and  I,  in  that  beau- 
tiful spot,  were  scarcely  ever  allowed  to  be 
alone,  and  only  twice  did  we  manage  to  ride 
away  together  to  the  sea  for  a  delicious,  ex- 
citing few  hours;  only  twice,  I  said,  for  the 
second  time  was  very  definitely  the  last.  .  .  . 
Somehow  the  Marquis  was  always  there. 
Not  in  any  unpleasant  way,  but  he  would 
just  happen  to  come  into  the  room  or  the 
particular  corner  of  the  large  garden  where 
we  also  happened  to  be ;  he  didn't  rebuke  or 
look  sulky,  he  was  just  the  same,  except, 
perhaps,  for  a  little  irony  to  Raoul,  whom 


The  London   Venture  183 

he  refused  to  take  seriously  as  a  young  man 
of  the  world.  And  there  is  where  the  old 
man  made  his  mistake  with  me,  for  I,  too, 
didn't  take  Raoul  seriously;  I  took  him  for 
just  what  he  was,  more  knave  than  fool,  a 
charming  companion,  and  a  very  personable 
young  man,  as  far  as  being  just  'personable' 
counts,  and  only  so  far.  If  I  had  been  al- 
lowed to  deal  with  the  matter  in  my  own 
way,  without  let  or  hindrance,  it  would  only 
have  been  very  pleasant  trifling,  and  certainly 
no  more;  even  as  it  was,  the  'no  more'  part 
of  it  was  still  safe  in  my  keeping,  thanks  en- 
tirely to  my  having  brought  myself  up  prop- 
erly; but  for  the  rest  a  simple  amusement 
became  a  rather  sordid  tragedy,  for  God  and 
guardian  had  combined  to  use  a  common- 
place young  man  as  the  climax  to  a  faded 
and  forgotten  little  fantasy,  once  sun-kissed 
by  a  May  morning,  now  to  be  shivered  and 
scattered  by  the  shrieking  sea  wind,  discord- 
ant chorus  enough  for  the  unmingled  des- 
tinies of  any  Tristans  and  Isoldas,  which 
kept  forcing  our  horses  apart  on  that  last 
morning  of  all,  when  we  three  rode  by  the 
sea,   and  made  a  world  of  anger  for  our- 


184  The  London   Venture 

selves  because  some  one,  something,  had  sud- 
denly pushed  us  out  of  the  other  world  where 
we  had  been  so  careless  and  happy.  .  .  . 

"Once  things  happened,  they  happened 
quickly.  For  all  my  not  taking  him  at  all 
seriously,  I  suppose  I  liked  him  quite  a  lot, 
really — I  must  have  done,  else  I  would  not 
have  been  such  a  fool.  He  was  my  first  ex- 
perience of  dishonesty  in  man,  and  I  sup- 
pose I  wanted  to  plumb  this  dishonesty  of 
his  to  the  depths,  which  was  very  stupid  of 
me  because  he  was  much  more  likely  to  find 
out  about  me  than  I  about  him.  .  .  .  Raoul 
had  been  at  the  chateau  two  weeks,  and  our 
little  affair  had  taken  the  important  and  un- 
pleasant air  of  a  conspiracy.  Our  own  stay 
was  to  last  another  month,  and  if  it  hadn't 
been  that  my  guardian  would  not  for  the 
world  have  offended  his  old  friend  by  cutting 
short  this  long-looked-for  visit,  he  would  very 
soon  have  taken  me  away  from  the  so  dese- 
crating gaze  of  young  Raoul. 

"On  that  day,  towards  evening,  he  and  I 
had  managed  to  steal  out  walking  for  an 
hour.  Agreeable  enough  as  he  was,  he  would 
have  bored  me  if  I  had  let  him.     But  I 


The  London   Venture  185 

wanted  him,  I  intended  to  keep  him  in  my 
mind ;  I  wanted  him  as  an  assertion  of  my  in- 
dependence from  the  old  man.  As  we  went 
back  up  the  drive  to  the  chateau  I  carefully 
became  as  animated  and  smiling  as  I  could, 
for  I  knew  that  he  would  be  watching  us 
from  the  drawing-room  windows,  and  I 
wanted  to  irritate  him  as  much  as  his  inces- 
sant care  was  irritating  me,  though  that 
would  have  been  impossible,  for  that  eve- 
ning I  was  absurdly,  fiercely  angry  with 
him.  Life  seemed  made  up  of  the  interfer- 
ences of  old  men.  I  didn't  want  old  men 
in  my  life.  I  wanted  young  men,  and  sun- 
shine, and  fun.  And  so,  as  Raoul  and  I 
went  up  the  steps  to  the  massive  door,  and 
as  I  turned  to  him  just  below  the  drawing- 
room  window  and  gave  him  my  most  trust- 
ful smile,  I  was  feeling  reckless,  unrestrained, 
fiercely  independent.  .  .  .  Oh,  Dikran! 
what  idiocies  we  do  for  the  fancied  sake  of 
independence ! 

"It  was  time  to  dress  for  dinner,  so  I  left 
Raoul  and  went  straight  to  my  room.  A 
minute  later  came  a  knock  on  the  door,  and 
as   I   turned    sharply   from   the   mirror,    it 


186  The  London  Venture 

opened  and  Raoul  stood  there,  rather  shy, 
smiling.  I  wasn't  old  enough  to  know  the 
proper  way  of  dealing  with  young  men  in 
one's  bedroom,  even  if  I  had  overpoweringly 
wanted  to. 

"  'I  had  an  impulse,'  he  said,  but  he  still 
stood  in  the  doorway,  a  little  question  some- 
where about  him.  I  didn't  answer  it;  just 
watched  him,  rather  interested  in  his  meth- 
ods. 

"  'Because,'  he  went  on,  'I  used  to  sleep  in 
this  room  once,  and  remember  it  as  a  dreary 
little  place,  and  I  wanted  to  see  what  it 
looked  like  with  you  in  it.'  Poor  silly  fool, 
I  thought,  but  rather  loved  him.  I  have 
found  since  then,  though,  that  his  fatuous 
speech  was  quite  the  proper  one  to  make,  for 
the  established  way  of  entering  a  woman's 
room  is  by  expressing  an  interest  in  the  fur- 
niture, thus  making  the  lady  self-conscious 
and  not  so  sure  about  her  dignity;  seduc- 
tions are  successful  through  women  fearing 
to  look  fools  if  they  refuse  to  be  seduced. 

"But  this  time,  as  he  spoke,  he  closed  the 
door  behind  him  and  came  into  the  room  to- 


The  London  Venture  187 

wards  me.     'This  isn't  playing  fair,  Raoul,' 
I  only  said ;  'you  will  get  me  into  a  row.' 

"  'Fair !'  he  said,  lifting  his  eyebrows,  the 
gallant  ass.  'My  sweet,  do  you  think  any- 
thing real  is  fair  in  this  world4?  And  don't 
you  trust  me?  That  isn't  fair  of  you,  you 
know — haven't  I  made  love  to  you  for  two 
weeks,  haven't  I  loved  you  for  two  weeks, 
haven't  I  loved  you  all  my  life — and 
now  ?'  And  with  that  he  had  me  in  his  arms, 
not  for  the  first  time,  mind  you,  but  this  time 
very  differently;  and,  over  his  shoulder,  as 
he  held  me,  I  saw  the  door  open,  and  the 
Marquis  stood  there,  outraged.  Raoul  didn't 
seem  to  know,  still  held  me,  and  I,  for  a 
paralysed  moment,  couldn't  move,  just  stared 
at  the  old  man  standing  very  stiffly  in  the 
doorway,  a  hand  outstretched  on  the  door- 
knob— hell  seemed  to  have  opened  for  him 
through  that  door,  and  he  could  move  as 
little  as  I.  At  last  I  jumped  away  from 
Raoul  with  a  sort  of  cry,  and  he  turned 
quickly  round  to  the  door.  He  didn't  go 
pale,  or  look  a  fool;  he  must  have  made  a 
study  of  such  contretemps ;  nothing  was  said, 


188  The  London  Venture 

the  old  man  waiting  in  the  doorway,  with 
words  terribly  smothered;  he  moved  aside  a 
little  from  the  door  as  though  to  let  a  dog 
slink  through.  But  Raoul  wasn't  going  to 
slink;  he  was  rather  pink,  negligent,  re- 
signed; and  as,  without  the  least  hurry,  he 
bent  over  my  fingers  and  his  eyes  smiled 
gently  at  me,  I  found  myself  admiring  him, 
really  loving  him  for  the  first  time.  Women 
are  like  that.  .  .  .  All  this,  of  course,  had 
happened  in  less  than  a  minute;  from  point 
of  time  my  guardian  came  into  my  room 
and  Raoul  left  it — but  in  point  of  fact  a 
great  deal  happened.  For,  as  Raoul  left  me 
and  walked  across  the  room  to  the  door,  and 
through  it  without  taking  the  least  notice  of 
the  old  man,  and  as  I  heard  his  even  steps 
receding  down  the  parquet  corridor,  my  first 
paralysed  fear  simmered  in  me  and  boiled  up 
into  a  fierce,  vixen  anger.  I  simply  trem- 
bled now  with  anger  at  the  old  man  as  I 
had  first  trembled  with  fear  of  him.  What 
right  had  he  to  be  standing  there,  ordering 
about  my  life  and  my  young  men?  What 
right  had  he  to  be  closing  the  door,  as  he  was 
doing  now1?    What  right,  what  right?    The 


The  London   Venture  189 

words  were  throbbing  inside  me,  just  those 
words,  fixed  unrestrainedly  on  the  old  man, 
who  had  made  a  step  towards  me,  and 
stopped  again.  .  .  . 

"  'Child!'  the  pain  in  that  one  word,  the 
lack  of  anger  in  it,  an  utter,  absolute  pain 
accusing  me,  did  not  soothe.  Accuse  me? 
By  what  right? 

"The  scene  was  dreadful,  Dikran.  I  can't 
tell  you  what  we  said,  what  I  said,  for  I  did 
most  of  the  scene-making.  He  just  forbade 
me  to  talk  again  alone  with  Raoul  or  to  go 
out  with  him;  said  he  would  take  me  away 
to-morrow  if  it  weren't  that  explanations 
would  then  be  necessary  to  our  hostess,  who 
was  in  feeble  health  and  might  be  killed  by 
such  a  disgrace  as  this  in  her  own  house.  As 
for  Monsieur  le  Vicomte,  he  himself  would 
arrange  that  I  did  not  see  him  for  longer 
time  than  could  be  helped.  That's  all  he 
said,  but  my  white  heat  took  little  notice  of 
his  commands.  I  said  I  don't  know  what — 
it  must  all  have  been  terrible,  for  it  ended 
on  a  terrible  note.  Dikran,  how  could  I 
have  done  it?  I  pointed  at  the  door  and 
asked  him  how  he  could  think  he  had  more 


190  The  London   Venture 

right  in  my  room  than  Raoul,  for  though  he 
was  my  guardian  our  relations  had  been 
changed  by  a  certain  proposal,  which  per- 
haps he  remembered.  ...  A  look  at  me,  in 
which  was  the  first  and  last  contempt  that's 
ever  been  given  me,  and  the  door  closed  on 
the  wonderful  old  man. 

"Dinner  that  night  passed  off  quite  well 
considering  the  unsettled  climatic  conditions 
aforesaid.  Myself  didn't  contribute  much, 
but  my  guardian  and  Raoul  talked  smoothly 
away  about  anything  that  came,  while 
Madame,  our  hostess,  smiled  sweetly  at  us 
all,  on  brooding  me  in  particular.  .  .  .  Quite 
early  I  made  for  bed;  the  old  man  and  I 
hadn't  exchanged  a  word  all  evening,  and  his 
'good  night'  was  a  little  bow,  and  mine  cold. 
As  I  passed  Raoul  he  cleverly  put  a  small 
piece  of  paper  into  my  hand.  Upstairs  in 
my  room,  that  piece  of  paper  said  that  he 
would  be  going  away  in  a  day  or  two,  and 
would  I  ride  with  him  to-morrow  morning 
before  breakfast,  at  seven  o'clock.  Of  course 
I  would. 

"It  was  all  a  silly  business,  Dikran.  If  I 
had  ever  been  in  love  with  Raoul,  I  certainly 


The  London   Venture  191 

wasn't  that  morning  when  we  rode  away 
from  the  gloomy,  silent  chateau,  a  little 
frightened  by  our  own  bravado;  for  that  is 
all  it  was.  But  later,  as  we  reached  the 
sands,  I  forgot  that,  I  forgot  Raoul,  though 
of  course  he  always  talked;  I  was  enjoying 
the  horse  under  me,  the  summer  morning, 
the  high  sea  wind  dashing  its  salt  air  against 
my  cheeks;  I  was  enjoying  every  one  of  those 
things  more  than  the  company  of  the  young 
man,  but,  tragically,  my  guardian  could  not 
know  that. 

"We  had  been  out  about  half  an  hour 
when  Raoul,  looking  back  over  his  shoulder, 
murmured, 'Ah!'  'What  is  it4?'  I  asked.  I 
could  barely  force  my  little  voice  through 
the  wind.  'That  old  man,'  Raoul  said  indif- 
ferently. 'It  seems  that  he  too  is  out  to  take 
the  salt  air.'  Yes,  there  was  a  figure  on 
horseback,  perhaps  half  a  mile  behind  us 
but  rapidly  gaining  on  our  slow  canter.  I 
had  forgotten  my  anger,  but  now  again  it 
thrust  itself  viciously  on  me. 

"  'Come  on,  let's  give  him  a  run,'  I  said, 
a  little  excitedly. 

"  'Oh,  no !    I  am  not  a  baby  to  be  chased 


192  The  London   Venture 

about  by  my  own  guests  or  other  people's 
grandfathers !' 

"Affected  idiot,  I  thought,  and  we  rode 
on  in  silence.  So  really  silly  it  all  was,  my 
dear;  for  if  it  hadn't  been  for  my  anger,  the 
natural  reaction,  in  a  way,  of  the  muffled 
life  I  had  led  with  him,  I  had  much  sooner 
been  riding  with  the  old  man  than  with  the 
young  one.  But  that  feeling  didn't  last  long 
— no  one  gave  it  a  chance  to  last.  For  at 
last,  after  what  seemed  an  age,  his  horse 
drew  beside  mine,  and  I  heard  his  voice  dis- 
tantly through  the  wind,  saying,  'Sandra! 
You  must  come  back.'  I  didn't  answer,  but 
worse,  I  looked  sideways  at  him  and  laughed. 
It  was  the  first  time  that  I  had  ever  seen  him 
in  the  least  bit  ridiculous,  and  my  laugh  took 
advantage  of  it.  Raoul  was  a  yard  or  so 
ahead  of  us  and  was  giving  his  horse  rein, 
and  so  I  put  mine  to  the  gallop — and 
heigh-ho!  there  were  the  three  of  us  racing 
away  on  the  Breton  sands — until,  with  won- 
derful and  dangerous  horsemanship,  my 
guardian's  horse  leapt  a  yard  or  so  ahead  and 
swung  broadside  round  in  front  of  our 
startled  horses.    Near  as  anything  there  were 


The  London  Venture  193 

broken  collar-bones.  Our  horses  reared  high 
up,  almost  fell  backwards,  nearly  braining 
the  old  man  with  their  frantic  hoofs,  and 
then  at  last  took  the  ground,  startled  and 
panting.  My  guardian  didn't  wait.  He 
pointed  his  whip  at  Raoul  and  said  sternly, 
'If  I  were  not  a  guest  at  your  mother's  house 
I  would  thrash  you,  for  that  is  what  you 
need' ;  and  then  to  me,  harshly,  'Come,  San- 
dra.   Enough  of  this  nonsense.     Home/ 

"  'Not  1/  I  cried  against  the  wind.  'I'm 
enjoying  my  ride.'  And  round  his  horse  I 
went,  towards  the  sea,  leaving  them  to  their 
argument.  I  almost  wanted  him  to  follow 
me,  I  was  so  bitterly  angry.  I  don't  know 
what  I  thought  I  would  do — but  I  suppose 
I  didn't  think. 

"I  must  have  galloped  two  hundred  yards 
or  so  when  he  was  beside  me  again.  I  took 
no  notice;  we  rode  on,  almost  knee  to  knee. 
And  then  I  saw  his  hand  stretch  out,  clutch 
my  rein,  and  pull ;  I  saw  red,  I  saw  nothing, 
or  just  his  old,  lined  face  bending  over  .  .  . 
and,  my  dear,  I  swung  my  riding-whip  as 
hard  as  I  could  across  it.  The  hand  left  my 
rein,  but  my  horse  had  already  been  pulled 


194  The  London  Venture 

up.  I  don't  remember  what  happened.  I 
stared  at  him  as  unbelievingly  as  he  stared  at 
me.  I  seemed  to  see  a  weal  across  his  face, 
where  my  whip  had  struck  him — had  I  done 
that?  And  then  he  smiled.  Dikran,  that 
dear  old  man  smiled  after  that  horrible  in- 
sult, so  sweetly  and  sadly. 

"  'That  then  is  the  end,  my  child/  he  said 
very  gently;  and  then  he  left  me,  and  for  a 
long  time  I  watched  him  as  he  rode  slowly 
away.    Frightfully  ashamed. 

"It  was  done,  irretrievably;  such  things 
can't  be  forgiven,  except  in  words;  and  as 
far  as  words  went  he,  of  course,  forgave  me. 
A  few  hours  later  I  saw  him  in  the  hall;  he 
was  going  to  pass  me,  but  suddenly  I  flung 
my  arms  about  him,  begging  him  .  .  .  very 
pitiful,  dreadful  thing  I  was.  He  was  splen- 
did. He  said  very  softly  into  my  ear  that  of 
course  he  forgave  me,  but  that  he  was  too 
old  to  have  a  proper  control  over  his  mem- 
ory, and  so  couldn't  forget,  and  that  he  was 
too  old  to  be  hurt  any  more,  and  so  this 
would  be  the  very  last  time,  for  he  didn't 
think  it  would  be  wise  for  me  to  live  with 


The  London   Venture  195* 

him  any  more.  'Sandra,  m}'  child,  you  must 
not  think  me  too  unkind  for  sending  you 
away,  but  I  think  it  is  the  best  plan.  You 
have  lived  with  an  old  man  long  enough — 
it  was  a  mistake.  I  see  now  that  it  was  a 
mistake.  You  must  forgive  me,  child.  I 
was  wrong  to  keep  you  so  long.  I  thought, 
perhaps,  it  might  have  been  different.  .  .  .' 
He  was  inexorable  about  that,  and  it  wasn't 
my  place  to,  I  couldn't,  beg  him  to  keep  me. 
I,  who  had  hurt  him  so  much ! 

"He  must  have  made  some  excuse  to  our 
hostess,  for  the  next  day  saw  us  in  Paris. 
Raoul*?  Oh,  I  never  noticed  him  any  more. 
And  two  days  later  I  was  with  a  stodgy  uncle 
in  Portman  Square,  hating  London  but 
hating  myself  more.  I  have  been  miserable 
many  times,  but  never  so  shamefacedly  as 
then,  during  the  two  weeks  which  passed  be- 
tween my  arrival  in  London  and  the  coming 
of  that  note  from  the  old  man's  valet,  saying 
that  Monsieur  le  Marquis  was  very  ill,  and 
the  doctor  said  he  would  die;  and  so  he  had 
taken  the  liberty  of  writing  to  me,  without 
permission,  in  case  I  should  like  to  go  and 


196  The  London  Venture 

see  him;  would  I  be  so  kind  as  not  to  tell 
Monsieur  le  Marquis  that  he  had  written  to 
me? 

"Like  a  young  woman  to  a  dying  lover,  I 
went  to  Paris,  and  with  a  terrible  flutter  in 
my  heart  stood  on  the  doorstep  of  the  stern- 
looking  house  in  the  R ue  Colbert.  .  .  .  They 
hadn't  told  him  I  was  coming,  but  he  must 
have  expected  me,  for  there  was  no  surprise 
in  the  smile  with  which  he  met  the  timid 
little  figure  which  came  into  his  room.  He 
seemed  to  me  not  ill,  but  just  dying;  he 
looked  the  same,  only  very  tired.  And  then 
I  realised  that  he  was  dying  because  he 
wanted  to  die.  An  angry  girl  had  shown 
him  that  life  was  indeed  not  worth  living, 
and  so  he  was  stopping  his  heart  with  his 
own  hand.  ...  It  was  terrible  to  realise 
that  as  I  stood  by  his  bed  and  he  smiled  quite 
gaily  up  at  me.  The  weakness  was  too 
strong  inside  him,  and  he  couldn't  speak,  just 
patted  my  hand  and  held  it  very  tightly. 
...  I  was  very  glad  when  I  was  out  of  that 
room,  and  I  did  not  see  him  again  before  he 
died  early  the  next  morning. 

"And  so  you  see,  Dikran,  for  all  your  talk 


The  London  Venture  197 

of  dies  ir<z  in  the  future,  I've  already  had 
my  dies  ir<z^  and  very  sadly,  too — and  been 
the  wiser  for  it  in  restraint." 

•  «  •  •  • 

Then  it  was  that  I  realised  with  a  start 
that  my  housemaid  was  staring  at  me  from 
the  door  in  the  grey  March  morning,  and 
that  I  was  not  listening  to  Shelmerdene  in 
a  backwater  of  the  Thames,  but  was  in  Lon- 
don, where  there  is  less  time  for  cherishing 
one's  ideals  than  for  enquiring  into  other 
people's.  .  .  . 


THE    END 


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